


Sparkler

by Pemm



Series: there is a season [1]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2013-06-07
Packaged: 2017-11-15 16:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 67,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pemm/pseuds/Pemm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <b>[BOOK I: SUMMER]</b>
</p><p>That's the thing about fire. You can look, but you mustn't touch. </p><p>And, sooner or later, it uses itself up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tobias

 

 **MASSACHUSETTS LAWS**  
**PART I, TITLE XX  
** **CHAPTER 148, SECTION 39**

   _No person shall sell, or keep or offer for sale, or have in his possession, or under his control, or use, or explode, or cause to explode, any combustible or explosive composition or substance, or any combination of such compositions or substances, or any other article, which was prepared for the purpose of producing a visible or audible effect by combustion, explosion, deflagration, or detonation._

 

* * *

 

**June 6 th, 1967**

The rock went wide of its target, and the girl with the singed eyebrows avoided it by inches. She stopped dead on the sidewalk as it smacked into a rusting street sign, and then the shouting started.

Shaking herself, she looked, and found two ragtag gangs of boys on either end of the narrow street. Both were closing in on the lot with the yellow grass—the very same she had been admiring from across the street. She had barely noticed them before. Instead she had been too focused on the grass itself, and how in the heat of summer it had gone so dry and brittle. It was such a shame it was in the middle of Boston instead of somewhere where she wouldn’t get in trouble if she lit the whole thing on fire.

The shouting got louder. More rocks zinged by, none coming so close as the first, and they were answered with jeers and a discarded beer bottle flung from the other direction. It spun lazily through the air and shattered on the pavement: a signal.

The quiet of the street splintered apart as the packs slammed together like a thunderclap.

She scarcely had time to dive behind a collection of musty furniture sitting on the side of the street, victims of an unpaid and unsympathetic landlord. The gangs converged on one another, eight against seven by her count. They swung hockey sticks or bats or fists, they came at each other as mad dogs would, all the air a frantic chorus of howls and yells. Insults were hurled like spears at anyone and everyone’s mother, and the group of eight, apparently all sharing the same mother if looks were anything to go by, took grievous offense. She watched as one of these, gangly and wielding a bat, knocked down one of his opponents and darted a little ways back—he lobbed a ball in the air above him, caught up his bat—swung—

The baseball hit the crumbling wall about eight inches from her head. The kid cussed and started winding up for another, and the girl decided it was time to leave.

It looked like there was an opening in the direction she needed to go. It had definitely been there a moment ago. She bolted, cleared a fire hydrant, and was nearly there when one of the boys staggered into her path.

There was a soft _whump_ , air leaving lungs. She threw out her hands to catch herself as the pavement rushed up to meet her, and white-hot pain seared through her palms as she made impact. Her arms gave way and she knocked her mouth against the ground with a sickening smack.

The riot died in almost the same moment, and when she slowly pushed herself up off the pavement she found herself surrounded by a silent crowd. She spat out blood.

Next to her, the boy she had collided with groaned, a hand coming to his head. Someone snorted. “Yo good friggin’ job Toby, you beat girls up a lot?”

“Stuff it, dumbass, I—oh, crap, it really is a girl.”

Their words barely registered. Her hands hurt. She looked at one, and found it a bloody mess; so was the other; the heels of her palms were thoroughly skinned. The bright red against the dark skin of her blistered and scarred hands looked strange.

Lifting her head, she found another hand outstretched toward her. Behind that was a sheepish-looking young man. It was one of the brothers, if the fact he had the same nose and ears as the other seven was anything to go by. He was all gangly limbs and bruises—he had a nice shiner brewing on his left eye, and his lip had been split open in two places. “Shoot, lady, wasn’t lookin’ where I was or nothin’—these wise-guys over here think it’s their turn on the lot—”

“Cuz it _is_ ,” said one.

The guy shot a glare over his shoulder as she ignored his hand and picked herself up. She brushed grime and gravel off her clothes, looked up at the pack. She’d bitten her tongue when she fell, and tested the sore place with her teeth.

Her hands felt like hell. They burned, and not even the clean, sharp kind of warning bite from a good fire. This was a pulsing, angry ache. Experimentally she flexed her fingers and winced at the pain. The one who had tried to help her up took notice. “Aw, hell, that looks like it hurts. There’s uh, there’s the corner store just ova’ there, you want I should—?”

She shook her head, saying nothing. There was gravel embedded in her skin.

“Oh,” the boy said, deflating. Someone else in the crowd chuckled. He hunched into himself, hands tucked up in his armpits. “All, uh, alright then.”

She scarcely heard him; she was already walking down the street again.

 

* * *

 

Her hands still hurt. The ache had dulled, but touching anything with her palms sent an angry flare of pain up her arms. Even so, the girl with the singed eyebrows had all but torn the salvage yard apart over the course of the afternoon, and the only thing she had to show for it was half a red brick.

She threw herself down on a stack of forlorn mattresses and glared at the empty wooden crates, tucked behind a row of rusting bicycles and warped with age and rain. The crates were supposed to have bricks in them. They had bricks in them for weeks, they hadn’t been touched at all in the last half-dozen times she’d visited the salvage yard for parts and pieces. The very fact the bricks had been there so long was what had got her to thinking about them in the first place, certain she could put them to use. And now that she had finally figured out what to do, someone else had come along and swiped them. Whoever it was would probably do something stupid with them, too, like pave a garden or something.

Now how was she supposed to build her kiln?

She huffed aloud, and her breath ruffled the lock of neglected hair that had escaped her ponytail while she’d looked for bricks elsewhere in the yard. It fluttered sadly for an instant before hitting her in the face again. She tucked it behind one ear, brushed dirt from her thrift-store clothes, and then stood. The whole beautiful day had been a waste, and the sky was starting to dim.

She shoved her injured hands into her pockets, and went to wait for the last bus of the day, thinking about how using those bricks for anything but a kiln was probably a sin. They had been perfect, the ideal raw material to build what she had come to think of as a kind of altar.

Twenty minutes later, when the bus rumbled haltingly to a stop, she was thinking of all the ways _she_ could have made better use of those bricks. She barely acknowledged the driver, who always had something friendly to say, or the smile from middle-aged businessman with the blue tie she often found herself on the same routes with. When she automatically stood up and followed the gaggle of other riders getting off the bus, she was thinking about alternatives to bricks and systematically dismissing them. (Rocks? Too irregular. Metal? Too dangerous, and where would she get the right shapes?) As the crowd dispersed, she stopped, and looked around.

Around her stood gaunt, dull buildings and stout little shops, papered in billboards and tattooed with graffiti. Cars trundled down the wide pavement like fat, sleepy beetles. The lines of telephone wires above cast blurry shadows over her, which formed themselves in strange crosshatches over whatever they touched. A rusting newspaper rack kept a lonely vigil to her left. It was noisy and claustrophobic, and she had gotten off at the wrong stop. Home was a good forty-five minute walk away.

The girl chewed her lip. Then she clenched her fists, winced, and mumbled something unladylike under her breath. She jaywalked through traffic and turned the first corner she came to.

There was a terrific, crackling bang at her feet, and she jerked backwards, her eyes wide and body rigid. The sound was exactly like the BB guns she remembered firing at clay pigeons (and live ones) as a kid; it couldn’t be anything else; who was shooting at her?

Before she could get behind cover—her choices were either the dented trash can or the chartreuse VW Beetle parked on the curb—someone said something, sharp and low. She stopped looking for snipers and instead looked at what was in front of her.

A positive stork of a boy was staring back at her with moon-eyes. He couldn’t have been more than a few years into his twenties, not much younger than herself. His limbs looked too long for him, and he even held himself like he was permanently walking on stilts. He clutched a small plastic bag in one hand, and it was filled with countless tiny white things. “Sorry ’bout that,” he said. “Didn’t think nobody’d be comin’ that . . . oh.” His eyebrows jumped, and the girl realized he had a hell of a shiner on his left eye, and his lip was split in two places. “You’re the one from the lot!”

She stared back. Shrugged.

Silence ensued. They looked at each other until the guy cleared his throat and straightened up some. “I uh, sorry, ‘bout before. Don’t think I said that.” His knuckles were bruised.

She shrugged again. He fidgeted, then snapped his fingers. “Hey, okay, I know. Lemme make it up to ya, how’s free samples sound?” He threw a thumb back over his shoulder as he said it.

Behind him stood a white booth as lanky and crazed as he was, set halfway into an alley. Bright bursts of color were painted on its sides, and a red-white-blue striped cloth covered the top. The inside of the booth, behind the dingy-looking counter, was dark and shadowy; faintly, she could make out stacks of something on shelving inside.

“I said ya ever lit a sparkler, lady?” the guy asked, and she snapped back to reality. After a long, awkward pause, she jerkily shook her head. He gave her a hockey-player-gapped grin, and he gestured her over to the booth. “Geez, ferreal? Heck, c’mon back, we’ll set you right up. Fourth’a July comin’ up, never had a sparkler, damn!”

Baffled, the girl followed. She watched silently as the boy disappeared into the booth itself. He fumbled around in the half-dark for a moment, then turned and dropped a thin cardboard box onto the counter. It looked cheaply made, and the front was covered in bright, stylized explosions. The words **BLAZING GLORY** were printed on the front. “Here we go,” he said, sliding it open with a practiced sort of motion. He produced a long, thin stick, more than half of it coated in something blue and powdery-looking. “Watch this.”

She barely heard him: he had pulled out a lighter from his pocket at the same time. It was a Zippo, brassy with age, scratched and dented. A 1951 model, maybe, or the 1966 reissue from last year. She owned several of that model; it was a good one, though most Zippos were. Was it engraved?—it was too dark to tell.

He flicked it open, smooth as anything, and a light blazed into life in the cavernous booth.

If he said anything more, she missed it. With a flourish of his bruised hands he had presented both firework and lighter, like a magician about to perform a trick, and then carefully put the flame to the blue tip.

She heard it before she saw it, a fizzling staccato not-rhythm mixing with soft _tseeers_ and crackling flares. The Zippo was pulled away and the Fire had bloomed into something new, bright and beautiful threads of sparks cascading into nothing.

She was transfixed.

 

* * *

 

“We there yet?” the boy panted. Over the two-by-two-foot crate of newly purchased fireworks cradled in her arms, the girl shook her head. She hadn’t been able to dislodge her smile since the sparkler was lit. The bricks, the incident at the avenue, and her scraped hands were all forgotten.

The boy, who was named Tobias and apparently worked part-time at the fireworks stand (“I got seven brothers an’ one ma, okay, gotta pull my weight, I ain’t no deadbeat.”), was almost-but-not-quite lagging a pace or two behind. He made a drawn-out, wispy sort of noise she couldn’t properly parse. “Awright, we _close_ to there yet?”

“Almost,” the girl said.

Her wallet had been utterly skinned of its contents just seconds after the sparkler Tobias had pressed into her hand sputtered out. She had spent the last half-hour fantasizing about all the pyrotechnics she was now the proud owner of. Tobias, suddenly without capital and a little shell-shocked, had offered to help her take them home. It was only gentlemanly, he’d said, and he still felt he owed her the favor. The alternative would have been several trips on her own, so she accepted. It was efficient.

Behind her, Tobias stumbled. The teetering stack of fireworks he carried did a spectacular leap and he nearly toppled over entirely (she wasn’t sure how he didn’t) trying to hang onto them; he only regained his balance by plowing hard into her shoulder. He squawked exactly like a chicken and reeled backwards, spine board-stiff. She’d stopped and locked her knees to stay upright, and swayed half a second before steadying herself. “Aw, dammit—crap, miss, sorry,” Tobias said, sheepishly. “You alright?”

She said yes, and kept going.

The evening had turned damp. Overhead, clouds threatened, and the air tasted thick, but even the threat of water couldn’t dull her mood for now. They had left behind the big buildings and cars, and now the world was quieting as evening drew on and drained everything of its color. Beneath them was weed-covered sidewalk, riddled with cracks like spidery hands. The remains of someone’s long-forgotten chicken wire fence had run alongside them for the last fifty yards. Sad little trees drooped at shoulder-height here and there, crowded and choked by skeletal bushes. It was silent but for their footsteps, and the occasional breath of wind through the trees.

The girl had just stepped over the last cement slab onto mushy, green grass, the five-minute-mark from her house, when Tobias said, “What were ya doin’ at the lot, anyway? Seems kinda outta your way.”

She tilted her head to one side at the question. “Was going to the dump.”

“Really? What for?”

“Bricks. There weren’t any, though.” Tobias had his own engraved Zippo, and sold the wonderful little fireworks—maybe he understood Fire, too. Maybe he would understand how she needed to make her alter, her monument, and what a travesty the bricks going to something undoubtedly mundane was. “I’m building a kiln.”

“A whoosit?”

Oh.

She sighed, and just gestured with a jerk of her head for him to follow.

They came around a bend in the scraggly trees and run-down fence, following what might have been, at some point in its life, a path. Here the immediate view was one with old wooden houses dotting the landscape, in various states of decay and neglect. An especially sagging, squat little home stood a little off to one side, red in color. It was surrounded by a high chain-link fence that seemed put together from scrap, chunks of salvaged pieces lashed together with twine and barbed wire. A robin’s-egg-blue shed—in even worse disrepair than the rest, leaning crazily to one side and looking like it might collapse at any moment—lay just beyond the house itself.

Tobias had caught up with her. She glanced at him, and found him gawking at the sickly buildings and the chain-link monstrosity. “That,” he said, “wow. Tell me nobody lives there.”

“I do,” she said. His head whipped around to stare at her, but she was already walking toward it. It was a perfectly good house; what a puzzling thing to say about it.

The wind picked up as Tobias trailed after her, bending the scrubs and the wild rosebushes that ruled the landscape as it went. The girl fumbled with the door’s handle, then eased it open: the rusted lock on it had never worked as long as she’d lived there.

Tobias watched her disappear into the dark mouth of the doorway, and followed slowly. He hung back on the doorstep, watching her as she set the crate of fireworks on a spindly table. She did something with her hands, and suddenly, there was light. An old-fashioned candle she cradled gently threw her shadow past her and over the dark shapes in the room.

Humming gently, she flitted around the room, lighting more and more candles: wall-mounted ones, ones sitting on side-tables, a whole cluster of blue ones sitting in the bottom of what was probably once an aquarium. She ignored the light switch set into one wall; the wiring was shot, and she thought the bulb was probably dead, too.

Deep shadows ate the furthest corners of the room, while the dancing lights revealed a home that was at once both spartan and disorderly. There was not very much there, beyond the candles, and the small collection of tools, bowls, and corrugated-cardboard boxes scattered and stacked on every available surface. A calendar three years out of date hung on one wall. Everything smelled like a campfire.

Tobias might as well have not existed for all attention the girl gave him. She fell now upon the fireworks, all fast fingers and eager gestures. They were laid out one-by-one on the table, stacked and arranged by size and color, quick as anything. The crate clattered onto the floor, empty, and she turned back to Tobias, hands outstretched.

“I can take them now,” she said.

Tobias gawped down at her, and in return she stared fixedly at his baffled face. When he did nothing else, she huffed softly, and simply took as many as she could carry right off the top of the stack.

They had already joined the others by the time Tobias came back to himself, and set the rest on the edge of the table for her. She grabbed and sorted them too, and then they were just both standing there, looking at the fireworks—or she was, at least. Tobias was staring at her through the haze of the candlelight and making no attempt to hide it. She had folded her arms across her chest, and was smiling a private smile.

“Well uh,” Tobias said, after a while and with his hands shoved in his pockets, “guess I better get back, anyway. Boss’ll wanna know where all his crap went. Uh, sorry about earlier.”

The girl started, as if she had forgotten he was there. Then she looked at him, and after a sort of painful delay, extended her smile to him, too. It felt awkward, stretching her mouth for so long. “Yeah. It’s fine.”

“Cool.”

And as Tobias walked home a few minutes later, their goodbyes exchanged, he realized he had forgotten to ask her name.


	2. Diesel

There were no bricks. There were no bricks _anywhere_.

Two days after she had bought out Tobias’s fireworks stand, the girl with the singed eyebrows found herself empty-handed, sitting alone at a bus stop on the corner of a quiet suburb, and not sure what to do next. All her usual haunts for dubiously free materials—the salvage yard, the Salvation Army, any and every construction site in a five-mile radius—were devoid of bricks. There was just _nothing_. Her kiln was shot, at least until further notice.

It was depressing, but she had other projects to work on. Her various building plans had consumed her life the last few years, and the kiln had been one of the last things on her list. She could fix up her shed, she supposed, dull as the idea was. It had started creaking dangerously in the wind lately. On the other hand, today she had found a discarded, intact gas pump handle at the salvage yard. It was such an unusual find, and she was sure she could find something to do with it.

The pump handle was at her feet, and she was sitting on the warped bench of the bus stop, waiting. She sighed, and inspected her hands again. The scrapes had scabbed over into interesting patterns that she couldn’t help picking at. They hurt less, but her stores of gauze and antiseptic were thinning, so they’d remained unbandaged. Digging through debris for another afternoon had done her no favors.

She almost missed the bus pulling to a halt in front of the stop. It honked, startling her out of her thoughts, and she scrambled aboard. The driver, an older woman with startling amounts of curls, waved. “Deep thoughts again today, love?”

“Guess so.”

“What’s that you have this time?” The driver nodded to the handle dangling from her fingers.

She shrugged. “Just a thing.”

“One more for the collection, huh.” The driver chuckled to herself, and the girl found an empty seat in the half-filled bus. She passed the businessman with the blue tie, mindlessly returned his traditional smile, and sat down.

The bus rolled on, and she thought about what to do with the handle in her lap until it stopped again. Some people got off and some people got on. She processed it in the same half-aware way she processed most things unrelated to Fire. When someone dropped into the seat next to her and said, “Heya!” loudly, she about jumped out of her skin.

It was Tobias, grinning his hockey-player grin. To complete the look, he had a pair of ice skates slung over one shoulder and a hockey stick in his hand, and was wearing an offensively bright jersey. His lip had mostly healed, but the black eye still stood out as strong as the day they’d met. She stared at him for a full ten seconds before answering. “Hi.”

“Didn’t know if I’d see ya again!” he started up cheerfully, and she barely got a “Yeah,” in edgewise before he took over. “Man I was just at practice, yeah? We’re gettin’ good, I mean real good. You know anythin’ about hockey? Heard’a the Sharks?” She shook her head, and he looked disappointed for a fraction of a second. “Aw, well, thassalright. That’s my team, the Sharks, right, an’ next week we got a game against the Jets. We’re gonna kick their butts, lemme tell ya! Buncha spineless wimps, couldn’t hit a puck if ya held it still for ‘em!”

It didn’t stop, and she found all she had to do was occasionally nod or make some kind of noise whenever Tobias paused for breath in his chipper babbling. It was nice, actually; he didn’t seem to want her to really understand what he was going on about, just that she would listen.

After a while his words sort of blurred together, and she was simply enjoying his sheer enthusiasm. Enthusiasm seemed rare anymore. She was drifting in this pleasant not-listening when something prodded her arm, and she came back to reality to see Tobias giving her a curious look. “Huh?”

“I said what’s yer name?” A pause. “If I can ask I mean. I forgot to th’other day.”

She blinked at him, trying to shake out of the sleepiness his chatter had brought on. “Oh. Sure.” And she told him.

He repeated it back to her, as if testing it, then burst into a smile again. “I like it. Good name!”

She quirked one brow up, entertained. “Thanks.”

“Y’know, I got like this uncle who does all this family tree stuff? He’s crazy about names. Like you can’t go visit him without gettin’ your ear talked right off. I go see him, right, and he’s like, _hmm, yes, Toby, means ‘you will fall outta a tree and land on a rake’_ or somethin’.” Tobias leaned closer to her, dropping his voice conspiratorially. “But the real kicker is his name is _Nimrod_. How great is that?”

Her snort was louder than she expected, and then they were both laughing. Gradually it petered off, and Tobias shifted in his seat. He was fidgeting with his jersey. “So uh, hey, like, what’re you doin’ t—”

There was tremendous squealing of tires, a sickening lurch, and a horrific crunch of metal, louder than thunder.

A collective noise of shock filled the bus as it pitched sideways at an angle, and the girl could _feel_ the asphalt ripping away the rubber beneath them. Tobias was hurled into her lap, sending the pump handle clattering against the side of the bus, and the blade of one of his skates grazed her cheek.

Then everything shuddered to a stop, and someone behind them screamed.

She smelled gasoline. When the bus had swerved she’d thrown out her legs and arms, trying to brace herself against the seat in front of her and the metal to the side. Now her joints ached from the impact, scabbed-over palms complaining loudly. Tobias had wound up halfway across her knees, obscuring whatever had happened. She twisted in her seat, trying to see over Tobias’s shoulder.

The first thing she saw was smoke, and then the twilight sky through a gap twisted into the metal, just above where a car had punched through the side of the bus. It was so close to them that she could have touched it if she leaned out into the aisle. The hood was lodged directly over what used to be two rows of seats, a crumpled nest of chrome and black and bright, bright red.

Around her, the air had become filled with panicky voices. Dimly she was aware that Tobias had pushed himself up off of her, and that the driver was yelling for everyone to get off the bus, _get the hell off_. All of it seemed faraway, unimportant, compared to the mangled thing wedged between the hood and the seats.

She could scarcely tell what was what. It was a mess of blood and torn clothing and hair. Chunks of sheared flesh were stuck behind the bumper. Bone shards decorated the stained fabric. Half of a face and a wide and unseeing eye stared out at nothing from under the car. A blue tie splattered with red spilled down over the mess like a lolling tongue.

It was the businessman.

“Oh,” Tobias was saying at her side, in a weak voice. “Oh, Jesus. Jesus _Christ_.”

Something unfamiliar and suffocating and electric was to settling over her. Not revulsion—not fear—something else. “He’s dead,” said the girl. “That’s. He’s dead.”

“No shit?!” snapped Tobias, tearing his eyes away to give her an incredulous stare. He looked sick.

Everything was noise and sound and horrible. The driver was there then, suddenly, telling them they had to _go_ , they had to go _now._

She stared at the wreck and the body for another long second before she obeyed, grabbing the miraculously intact handle as she followed a keeled-over Tobias. The smell of diesel and smoke followed her out.

 

* * *

 

The girl with the singed eyebrows picked absently at the band-aid someone had put over the cut on her cheek.

An hour had passed, and no one had been allowed to go home yet, for reasons she had missed. She and Tobias had spent most of that time sitting with their backs to a pockmarked telephone pole, facing away from the crash. Neither of them had said anything, and she preferred it that way.

The suburban street seemed quieter than it should have been. A police car was parked on the curb near the crash, idling with a soft rumble. One or two of the people who had come out from their homes to see what the fuss was about were still watching from their porches. Far away, the blurry town lights glowed and flickered, and at either end of the street headlights would sometimes reflect off the day-glo yellow tape that read POLICE LINE - DO NOT CROSS - POLICE LINE.

In the last hour, she had learned the following: a car had pulled out of a blind alley. They hadn’t been able to identify the body in the bus yet. The bus driver had a stronger stomach than the police officer that had come to handle the crash. Tobias performed badly under stress. Up close, ambulances were _loud_.

For the last few minutes, she had been thinking about the body. More specifically, how two hours ago the owner of that body had looked over his newspaper at her and smiled before looking back down, like he always had. Now he was chunks of meat in a lumpy body bag being wheeled away by the paramedics.She had never seen a dead person before, and it occurred to her that the fact she had seen one at all did not actually trouble her.

She wasn’t upset. She had a kind of idea that maybe she was meant to be. Maybe—the businessman had been a sort of friend, as far as she had friends. Human emotion dictated she should be, at least, a little troubled. Right? _Bothered_ , surely. And yet there was nothing. She did not feel much different than she had a few hours ago.

Tobias was certainly upset, and he hadn’t even known the guy.

A glance his way found him sitting with his long legs crossed, knees sticking out so far it was comical. He held his face in one hand, and the other was tangled in a handful of weeds growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk they sat on. At his side lay his skates and hockey stick. He was staring into the distance down the street, his eyes out of focus.

“Tobias?”

Tobias flinched, hard. He sat bolt upright and it took him a moment to realize it was her who had spoken. There was something haunted about the way he looked at her. “What?”

The girl put her head to one side, questioningly. “Should I be upset?”

A silence fell over them. Tobias was perfectly still, and his expression had suddenly gone impenetrable; she couldn’t place it as anything for a few seconds, and then it went from blank to completely nonplussed, and then incredulous. He opened his mouth, and then shut it, and opened it again. In the end he said nothing, and, irritated, she spoke instead. “Because I’m not.”

Beside her, Tobias exhaled, slowly. “Well,” he started. “I uh. I guess I dunno.”

“You’re upset, though,” she said pointedly.

At her words he jerked away, visibly, like she’d tried to hit him. “Well ‘scuze me for havin’ a _problem_ gettin’ up close and personal with a _corpse_!” he snapped, getting to his feet. She stared. “I’m gonna have nightmares for a, a fuckin’ year, alright? God! The guy was friggin’  . . . he was right _there_ , an’, an’ there was blood everywhere an’ . . . Jesus _Christ_  . . . how can that not upset a guy?”

An uncomfortable pause, and she realized he actually wanted an answer. She had no such thing. For a long few seconds she looked at him fixedly, and then back at the horizon. She regretted the question, now. Of course Tobias was upset. Tobias was an emotional loudmouth.

He sagged, and the tension in the air drained away. He kicked at his skates. “It’s,” he started, then stopped. It took him a moment, and then it all spilled out so quickly she didn’t process it right away. “I was gonna to sit next to that guy ’til I saw you.” With a deep, shuddering breath, he knelt to pick up his hockey stick. “I keep thinkin’ about that. Okay? That coulda been me under there, I coulda . . . ” He bit his lip, and spun the stick between his palms.

“Excuse me?” said a new voice.

The girl twisted to look behind her. A man, clad in a light blue dress shirt with a black tie and wearing a peaked cap, was standing behind them. He had one hand pressed against the telephone pole, and he looked tired. “You’re free to go now. Apologies f’the wait, couldn’t be helped. Do you two need a ride?”

Tobias slid a hand through his cropped hair and sighed. “That, yeah. If you’re offerin’. My ma’s gonna be wonderin’ where I’m at.”

In another ten minutes, they stepped out of the police car onto the inner city sidewalk (“Can walk from here,” Tobias had said, and she had no complaint). Night had set in, and it was the bleary haze of a city night that never got quite dark. A streetlight stood a few yards away, and they were on a bridge above the canal that weaved from one end of town to the other. Tobias stretched out his long legs, sighed, and plodded over to the rail to look at the water. She did the same. There was nothing better to do.

He had slung his arms over the railing and leaned out over the water, so she followed suit, carefully. For a long while they just stayed like that, despite the chill in the air, and the headache she discovered beginning to throb in her temple that grew worse the longer she looked at the water.

“Y’know I once had this friend named Lenny?” Tobias said. She glanced over at him. “Good guy, pretty much a dumbass, built like a truck. Me and Lenny, we was pals from the word go, yeah? Met each other in second grade. He got me into hockey, kicked my ass at it every day ‘til we was fourteen. But he wasn’t ever a jerk about it, right, he’d just laugh and be like, hey, keep trying, it’ll happen.”

His voice trailed off, and she had been about ask why he was telling her this when he went on. “He said that a lot. ‘Keep trying, it’ll happen.’ He was a real softie, too. Like, once, my neighbor’s cat had kittens? An’ she couldn’t feed no kittens, she said, so she was gonna drown ‘em, and when Lenny heard ‘bout that he went right over and bought ‘em all for ten bucks. Ten bucks for a buncha cats! And he wasn’t loaded or nothin’. Hell, he was poorer’n shit. Didn’t sell the cats, though. Gave my sister one when it was old enough. God, she loved that, still has the damn thing. Named it Puzzle.” As he spoke, he’d let a smile drift onto his face. She watched him, silent, and he didn’t look back, just stared out over the murky ripples of the canal. “Real softie . . . ”

Tobias reached up and pressed his fingers to his forehead, like he had a headache too. His eyes were shut. “Shit, I dunno why I’m tellin’ you this.” Met with silence, he exhaled heavily. “Moron couldn’t let nothin’ go under his nose if he thought he could stop it. He lived over in Sunrise, y’know that neighborhood?” She shook her head. “No, well, you’re from outta town, Sunrise is bad news. Nowheresville. Ghetto. Gangs, lotsa flakes and hippies. Lenny’s folks couldn’t ever really hack it so they was stuck there and lemme tell you, he got his ass kicked all the damn time ‘cuz he’d go stick his nose anywhere he thought there was trouble. An’ . . . y’know . . . one day he got trouble back.”

He cricked his neck, and slouched. “Guess this was round about three years back. Way I heard it he was tryin’ to get this girl’s ex or somethin’ to lay off her one night in an alley or somethin’, keep him busy while she legged it. Kept him busy all right. Got stabbed four times. When they found Lenny, he’d already—y’know. Gone to see the big guy upstairs.”

The canal burbled under them, and the girl had taken to looking at it instead of Tobias, even though it made her headache worse and her stomach lurch. His voice had gone wobbly near the end. She was supposed to say something, she thought, like “I’m sorry” or “How awful”, but she had nothing to say.

By the time he began again, at least, he’d gotten himself under control. “I can’t figure it out, I guess. I mean Lenny died kind of a hero. If he had to go that’d’a been what he’d pick, savin’ somebody. But why’d he have t’go at all? He kept tryin’ an’ all that happened was he got killed.” He started fumbling for something in his pocket, and when she heard the familiar snap of a Zippo lighter she looked up. He was cupping it and a Newport in his spindly hands. He pocketed the lighter and took a long pull before speaking again. “An’ the guy under the damn car back there, what’d he do to deserve that? Nothin’. Or hell, whadda I know, maybe he did deserve it, maybe he friggin’ beat his wife or somethin’. Or maybe he coached his kid’s baseball league and rang Salvation Army bells at Christmas. We sure ain’t ever gonna know.”

There was more he wanted to let out, she could tell, but he held it in. She found herself chewing on her tongue, in the same sore place from the fall, and her headache was getting sharper. “I’d see him on that route a lot,” she said at last. “Always smiled at me.”

“There you go, and now he’s smoked meat on a gurney,” Tobias hissed, biting on his cigarette. The mental image brought back the scene on the bus, and she discovered, finally, a reaction. The memory moved something in her, at least; there was the faintest lurch of horror in her gut, so pale as to be a ghost. Then it was gone, utterly overridden by—what? Fascination, maybe, or curiosity. She wasn’t sure. What would fire do to a human body?

Tobias took another heavy drag, twisting the cigarette between his fingers as he exhaled a long trail of smoke. Then he offered it to her. His hand was shaking so faintly she nearly missed it, and his skin was clammy when their knuckles brushed as she took it. She fitted it between her lips, took an experimental pull, and he asked, “You really ain’t upset?”

She glanced over at him and found him watching her steadily. She thought about it.

“No,” she decided.

It occurred to her, as she blew the smoke out through her teeth and admired it, that there might be something wrong with her.


	3. Rendezvous

 

It was raining, and when it rained, her whole yard smelled a little like sulfur.

This was always worrisome. She constantly found herself running to the door when she heard the first pit-pats of water on the roof, checking to ensure she hadn’t left anything out in the open—firewood, half-finished projects, tanks of gasoline or books of matches.

She never anything left outside, she knew that. But she would always wind up standing just inside her doorway, the rain lashing at her feet, and squinting out into the overgrown yard. It was dalmatian-spotted with patches of burnt grass and strangle-weed. Bittersweet and ivy choked the chain-link, and shaggy bushes stood guard on the edges. Rain would collect in half-melted buckets and pour down the drainpipes of her shack to collect in antique rain barrels. Then she’d shudder, hard, and get back inside before the water could touch her further.

She never left while it was raining.

This fact was how the girl with the singed eyebrows found herself trapped in an Ace Hardware, almost a week later (the calendar behind the desk was now on June 29), meandering down the paint aisle for the fourth time. Rain smeared down the plate-glass windows, and her head had started to pound again.

Lacking bricks, she had begun casting through her dwindling ideas: the nests of loose-leaf paper scattered in corners of her house, covered in sketches and scribbling. Most she had discarded long ago or built already, but one had stood out: her opus, carefully folded and tucked away until she had the means and skill to construct it. A copy was sitting in her pocket even now, as reference, while she shuffled around the store again.

Hell. It had been half an hour, and the cashier was starting to watch her.

She slunk down another aisle and sat down on an empty stretch of bottom shelf. She set the paper bag with her purchases inside down at her feet, its metal treasures clinking together, and pressed her fingers to her temples. The pressure helped, sometimes. It wasn’t, much, today.

Why did it have to rain?

According to the big clock on the wall, the one with the wrench and screwdriver for hands, it was almost two. Almost two meant she was late, and that got to her like needles under her skin, like bamboo slivers under her nails. Promises were meant to be kept, even simple ones like this.

It was the scrawny kid’s fault, the one who could run his mouth quicker than she’d thought physically possible. He’d shown up on her doorstep yesterday, banging on the door with his dented bat and hollering until she couldn’t ignore him anymore. She’d opened it to find the kid who had been hitting baseballs into the mob that day on the avenue. He was Tobias’s youngest brother, he’d said, and that dumb sonovabitch was really screwed up over some crazy crash or somethin’, and he’d talked about this weird girl he’d been with on the bus that lived out in the backwoods and holy crap wasn’t she the one he smacked into last week, that’s nuts, but anyway it was gettin’ so no one could friggin’ _sleep_ no more at home ‘cuz Toby kept freakin’ out or some crap, so he’d tracked her down ‘cuz he could find any damn thing, he’d been in Boy Scouts awright, and could she come maybe try an’ talk some sense into the whiny bastard, they were desperate, hell, what a chump.

Faced with the threat of literally having her ear talked off, she had agreed to be outside the old police station at 1:45 the next day. The kid had looked so relieved she wasn’t even all that annoyed.

But now it was raining, and so she was trapped.

It continued to rain for another fifteen minutes. She stared defiantly at the collection of cabinet handles until the persistent staccato on the windows faded. When she peeked out again, the sun was bleeding through the still-heavy clouds, bleaching the sidewalks.

The cashier looked up in alarm when she ripped the door open, and then she was bolting.

Redfield County Police Station (NOTICE: _building condemned_ , Do Not Enter) was ten minutes walking from Ace Hardware, and she made it in five. She stumbled to a halt across the street from it, panting hard. It loomed at her, the boarded-up windows like eyes nailed shut. Gaps where shingles used to be studded the low roof like missing scales, and a web of graffiti crawled across the bottom. The neglected trees and unmown grass surrounding it were shiny-wet. Everything smelled like rain, normal rain, not sulfur-rain. That was worse.

Around her was decay. The forgotten police station was just one in a collection of abandoned and condemned buildings; anonymous brick and mortar structures with shattered windows rose up from the cracked pavement all around her, and dented streetlights stood watch like one-eyed scarecrows. Even the street was more tar than asphalt. It was one of those places that felt older than the town it was a part of: so devoid of life that it seemed impossible life had ever been there at all.

In the distance a jackhammer revved to life. A bluebird huddled in a bush a few feet off, huge with puffed feathers. Everything was wet, wet, wet, and the sun made it worse by highlighting every ff _fucking_ drop, and Tobias was not there.

She pressed the heel of one hand to her temple and looked around one last time. Then she folded in on herself, sinking down to sit on the curb with her paper bag, and digging her scalded fingertips into her arms.

She would wait. Maybe he was late, too.

That was fine for a while. That was fine until she noticed that somewhere water went _drip, drip, drip_ and the sound bored into her skull worse than the jackhammer. She couldn’t focus on anything else. Her headache was flaring back up, steadily moving toward the “dizziness and nausea” stage. She chewed her lip, and before she really knew what she was doing her hands had vanished into the pockets of her green jacket. Her fingers searched, feeling slow and numb, until they collided with the metal and plastic hidden within. It was cool and solid to her touch, the old dents and scratches familiar and comforting. She pulled out the lighter, a sleek little yellow BIC number, and flicked it open; the flame was weak in the daylight. With an easy jerk of her thumb she put it out again. Lit. Unlit. Lit. Unlit. Lit  . . .

She had no idea how much time had passed when someone called her name; could have been one minute, could have been twenty. Fumbling to snap the lighter shut and pocket it again, she searched for the speaker.

It was Tobias, across the street, dripping wet and loping toward her with his hands shoved deep into his red letterman jacket. An unlit cigarette hung from his mouth, and dog tags she hadn’t seen before jangled around his neck. His shiner was just a trace of greenish-purple around his eye now, but he had acquired dark circles under both. “Uh, hey.”

“Hey.”

He came to a halt in front of where she sat, leaning back on his heels. Reaching up, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and began carefully, “ . . . So uh my kid brother—”

The girl snorted. “Never shuts up?”

He stopped, and a grin spread across his face. “No kiddin’. Try living with the guy. He can run like damn, though, you should see him go.” A bead of water fell from his hair and rolled down his cheek, agonizingly slow. How could he stand it? “Thanks for coming? I dunno really what he thought was gonna happen, but, like, hey, nice to see ya.”

She rolled her shoulders almost imperceptibly in response. “Yeah. S’fine.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“Parts.”

“For?” he pressed.

“Building something.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t getting more than that out of her. He didn’t even know what a kiln was.

He scratched his head. “Well uh, yeah, alright then. Cool.”

Neither of them said anything more, and the silence grew uncomfortable. Then Tobias said, “Oh!”, snapped his fingers, and grinned. “I know why he picked here. Wanna see something great?”

 

* * *

 

The skeletal remains of an antique warehouse were tucked behind the old station, down a long dirt driveway and sequestered behind high chain-link fence someone had hacked a hole through. It was cramped, and half-filled with the gutted remains of impounded cars. Spray paint decorated the walls and cars alike: _Sharks Eat Jets!!_ ; a peace symbol; Kilroy Was Here. A puddle stood beneath a hole in the roof on one side, and the water in it was jumping, because it had started to rain again.

“This is where me an’ my brothers’d hang out when we was kids,” Tobias said, absurdly proud. She could barely hear him over the rain, over the growing pounding in her head. “Don’t come ‘round much no more, though . . . hey, whoa, ‘tcha doin’?”

Newspaper. There was newspaper, still dry with the heat of summer and discarded by a stack of raggedy cardboard. She had shoved her bag into Tobias’s arms and gone straight for it before she knew what she was doing.

The paper was too close to the wall, the rain, the _sound_ for her liking, and so she moved it closer to the center of the warehouse. The cardboard followed next, and Tobias watched her with a kind of baffled awe as she sat down and began making kindling. There was no wood, and her fingers were acting stupid, but this would have to do.

By the time she’d ripped everything up and put it back together properly, Tobias had sat down cross-legged beside her, chin propped on bony knuckles, her bag in his lap. Gingerly, she withdrew her BIC again and set the little black-and-white tipi aflame. As the paper curled into ashy feathers, her shoulders sagged in relief. The lighter disappeared back into her jacket. She leaned on her knees and watched it, basking in the sight and sound and scent. Even as small as it was, it was perfect.

She’d almost forgotten Tobias was there until he spoke. “You still not upset?”

“About what?”

He snorted gently. “The, the thing on the bus. Guess not, though.”

There was a pause. “I had a nightmare the other night,” she said. “About drowning.”

“Yeah?”

“But it’s one I have a lot.” She tilted her head to one side as she gazed into the fire. “Your brother said you were having problems.”

At her side, he grimaced, then sighed so heavily she actually looked at him for more than a moment. Their eyes met, briefly, before he turned back to the blaze, and it dawned on her that he looked . . . off. Different, tired?—no, tired wasn’t the right word. There was more to it than the bags under his eyes. “I haven’t been able to sleep,” he said. “Like, any. Guess he mentioned that. It’s like, I try goin’ t’bed and it just don’t come. S’been like that since the thing on the bus.” He shifted where he sat, rolling his cigarette between his fingers. “I’ll go like that two, three days and then I either start talkin’ t’myself an’ seein’ things or I crash, an’ even when I crash I wake up as tired as I was before. My brothers, right, Jeremiah an’ Roger, we share a room an’ I’m drivin’ them up the damn wall, they told me don’t come home ’til I stop bein’ crazy.” He grinned, weakly, and stuck his unlit cigarette back in his mouth.

Hollow. He looked hollow. She frowned. “Just because of the bus?”

Tobias made a soft, exasperated noise and waved his hand without looking at her. “I know, I know, alright. We ain’t all . . . spooky untouchable like you, ‘kay? I’m surprised too.” She shrugged, and he reached forward to flick a pebble into her little creation. “So what’s the fire about?”

Her mood flipped so quickly she thought she would get whiplash. “What the hell is it to you?” she snarled. The way the words caught and tore over her teeth, coming out misshapen and vicious, surprised her. It surprised Tobias, too, if the look on his face was anything to go by.

And then it was quiet, except for the patterns of the rain, and the fire. Tobias was slow to overcome his shock, and it took him a few seconds to say, “It was jus’ a _question_.” She shot him a dark look, and he ignored it: he was pulling out his own lighter, glaring at it like it had insulted him. He lit his cigarette and breathed. “Friggin’  . . . jus’ tryin’ to make conversation.” He took a long, hard drag, and made a frustrated gesture with one hand as he pulled it away. “You’re hard to talk to, you know that? Either you say nothin’ or you say somethin’ . . . somethin’ weird as hell.”

“ _Gosh_ ,” she said, the word dripping acid. “No one has ever told me that before. I am enlightened! _Thanks_.”

Tobias didn’t answer. She glowered at him a few seconds longer before reaching for more newspaper. She had nearly fed the rest of it into her little blaze by the time he spoke up. “It’s just you don’t see girls buyin’ out firework stands an’, an’ like buildin’ stuff and lighting fires much.”

She gave him a low, irritated growl. He pressed ahead anyway. “Makes a guy curious.”

“Screw off.”

Tobias looked at her, her with her eyes sharp and angry and defensive, then threw his hands into the air in surrender. The conversation was over. Time passed in silence, and she found herself fidgeting badly.

The rain showed no signs of stopping, but it was not, at least, getting worse. The smoke from her fire and his Newport weaved up and around, painting abstracts in the air. Tobias had slouched as deep into his jacket as his long limbs would allow, and he looked half-crazed with his rain-mussed hair and wet clothes and sullen, empty glare. The last one, especially, didn’t fit—she had already defined Tobias as an ineffably cheerful moron, and he was challenging that pigeonhole. It irritated her.

Time passed, but neither of them left. Whoever left first was the loser, maybe, or else they were simply both too stubborn for their own good. But eventually, Tobias sighed and said, “Sorry.”

The girl gave him a suspicious look. He raised one eyebrow. “I’m tryin’ t’apologize.”

“ _Right_.”

“I am!” he asserted, puffing on his cigarette. “For offendin’ your delicate lady sensibilities or whatever.” Smoke drifted out of his mouth as he said it, and he pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. “I mean. Crap. You don’t wanna talk about it, thas fine, you’re right, thas none’a my business anyway. I ain’t slept in two days, I’m not really thinking all that straight. So . . . sorry.” He dropped his arms and gave her a sidelong glance before outstretching one hand. “Peace?”

She opened her mouth to respond, and realized she had no idea how. So she shut it again, her brow furrowing. Tobias looked at her a while longer before giving up and dropping his hand.

The fire was getting low. She deliberated, then threw the last of the cardboard onto it and said, “It makes me feel better.” She peered sideways at Tobias to gauge his response, and found him just looking at the flame. “The fire. Sometimes I get too wound up or stressed out, and making a fire, burning something, it helps me calm down.” She paused. “That’s weird, right?”

Tobias screwed up his face, like he was thinking. “Maybe? Geez, I dunno.”

“I haven’t met anyone who thinks otherwise.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “Keep tryin’. It’ll happen.” Lenny’s words, she remembered. “Already did, maybe. You’re one-of-a-kind, firebug.”

“Firebug,” she repeated.

“Fits, don’t it?”

“I have a name.”

“Two names never hurt nobody.” He said it with a smile, and offered her his cigarette.

She took it, after a long, hard stare, but didn’t smile back.


	4. Arson

 

Dark.

Around her, tiny eddies swirled. Bubbles surged up past her like frightened fish. Water flooded her lungs.

She was sinking, drowning, and her feet were ensnared by something she could not see. Every struggle only dragged her further below, and her chest hurt, it _hurt_ , she was _dying_.

The last of her air slipped from her lips, and she fell off the bed with a thump.

Outside, crickets chirruped. The black around her was as still and unassuming as it ever was; a single candle in a bone-dry fishbowl acted as a night light across the room. It cast shadows over her few belongings: a gas mask, a stolen traffic cone, a dusty pink purse overflowing with matches. A tiny collection of books ( _The Picture of Dorian Grey_ , _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde,_ a signed and much-loved copy of _Fahrenheit 451)_ stood in a row on the windowsill. Nothing was amiss, and she was very much alive.

Gingerly, she untangled her legs from the sheets and crawled back onto the mattress. She dragged the pillow over her pounding head, shut her eyes, and waited for sleep that she knew would not come.

About an hour and a half later, when the light was just beginning to creep into her window, she hauled herself out of bed. She got dressed, ate an apple and grabbed a lighter (ST Dupont, 1966, blue), then headed out into the dawn.

Her shed was waiting for her, a black silhouette haloed by the waking sun. It looked just as precarious as ever: it was quite literally slanted diagonally, with missing boards leaking sunlight. Its rickety door swung open at her touch, like it had been waiting. The tension ebbed out of her just by looking into the ramshackle place. Within stood her kingdom.

It was dry and warm, and dark. The air was still around her as she grabbed one of her miniature kindling bundles from a box near the door and settled down in the middle of the dirt floor. She closed her eyes, breathing, and flicked on the lighter. She watched the minuscule flame for a moment before putting it to the bundle. Let there be light.

The kindling crackled to life, dead and processed wood resurrected, purer and more beautiful. It threw fuzzy shadows over the muddled shapes in the rest of the shed, shapes she knew by heart. On one side stood huge stacks of firewood, neatly arranged by kind and size. On the other was a selection of sawhorses and tarps, with scrap metal and tools scattered on them. Tanks of gasoline, kerosene, and propane, half a dozen of each kind, stood in neat rows in the corners, organized by kind and interspersed with bottles of lighter fluid. In the back, nestled between a sturdy workbench and a bookshelf held together with rusty nails and splinters, both home to lighters and matches and broken parts, sat her new hoard of fireworks, patiently waiting to be released.

She stared into the fire, disgustingly awake. The nightmares had been getting worse. This was the third day in a row she had woken up in a cold sweat, left with a headache and insomnia. Each time she had wound up out here, doing nothing in particular. Sometimes she would fuss with her Big Project, or weld something for the hell of it. By the time the sun rose properly, though, she always seemed to be right here: sitting cross-legged in the center of her rickety shed and burning a little fire to drive away the dreams.

The first one soon died away into a pile of ash, and she went through another two before frustration began to gnaw at her rattled nerves. She felt like she had been chewing tinfoil. This wasn’t working. She needed something bigger, like a bonfire, maybe. But there was no space for a fire that size on her meager property, especially not anywhere near the shed.

The silence was broken by her exasperated sigh. She stood, snuffing out the last few ashes of the flame, and made her way to the far end of the building to the workbench. She knelt, and a tarp-covered lump awaited her. The gas pump handle she had rescued stuck out from beneath the tarp at one end, its scuffed plastic painted over with the last of her paint. Smiling, she patted it in a familiar way before hefting it up to the workbench and pulling off the tarp.

There it was. Her ultimate creation, her opus. The pump handle was attached to one end, and there was a fat metal nozzle at the other. A propane tank was fastened to the bottom, and a network of fat tubes connected everything like veins. She flicked a switch on one side, and a tiny blue flame sputtered to life from the narrow pipe that stuck out beneath the nozzle. It flared wide for a moment before dying. She flicked the switch twice more, and got nothing for it.

Her brow knit, and she bit her lip. Then she grabbed her drill.

 

* * *

 

“So why’d you call me down here again?” Tobias said, yawning.

“I told you I wanted to show you something. Put out your cigarette while you’re in here.”

He did, dropping it to the dirt floor and grinding it out. “At freakin’ midnight though?”

“Fewer people around.”

Two days later: it was warm and sleepy in the girl’s shed, and she was pulling on thick cloth gloves. A rusty army-issue flashlight layat hand on the bench. Behind her, Tobias was slouched into roughly the shape of a question mark, with sleep-heavy eyes and his hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets. The light pinned his shadow to the wall, huge and looming and hunched.

The gloves were just snug enough, warm and rough against her skin. She wrapped her fingers around the machine on the workbench and hefted it up experimentally. Just getting the balance and weight of the thing right had taken her hours, but it had been worth it for the perfect result she had achieved. It was even light enough to run with. Satisfied, fingers itching to begin, she swung it around. Tobias jumped back with a squawk, throwing his hands in the air. His shadow lurched in pantomime. “Whoa! _Whoa_. What the hell is that?”

“My flamethrower,” she said, proudly.

He gave her a baffled look. Your what?”

“Flamethrower. Throws flames? Do I really have to spell this out?”

“Yeah okay I know what it _is_ but _why do you have it?_ ”

She shrugged, leading him out of the shed. “I made it.” She looked over her shoulder at him and was met with a bewildered stare. She rolled her eyes. “Just come on.”

He did, but not without running his mouth. “You made that thing? How?”

“With tools. And scrap tubing. And a gas pump handle.”

“But you’re . . . ” He sputtered, so utterly caught off guard she had to smile to herself. “God. Goddamn. And it works?”

“Yes,” she said, more defensively than she’d meant to. She hesitated, then corrected herself. “Should. Guess we’ll see,” she added, picking up the flashlight. She headed for the door, motioning for him to follow.

She led him out of her yard in the dark and through the sleeping neighborhood (“It’s so damn quiet around here,” he complained once, lighting up a new cigarette, “you’re like a million miles from the city, took me an hour to walk here, surprised I didn’t get ax-murdered or nothin’, you better be grateful.”), toward the woods a ways off. The moon, a fat crescent overhead, seemed pale and washed out before her flashlight. It was a thirty-minute walk, and Tobias was uncharacteristically quiet; whenever she glanced back at him he was looking worriedly at the machine in her hands.

Soon they reached the tree line. They had been crunching their way through the cold undergrowth for about five minutes before Tobias finally said, “Where we goin’?”

“Shut up a minute and you’ll see.”

“Geez! I’m just askin’, relax,” he grumbled, biting his cigarette. “Kinda flyin’ blind here, yeah? Followin’ Miss Firebug and her Amazin’ Homemade Freakin’ Flamethrower into the woods in the middle of the night. This is _trust_ right here, okay, a guy starts gettin’ questions! You ain’t gonna test that thing on me, are ya? No? Okay, cool, yeah haha, uh, just, just joshin’ ya.” He hunched into his jacket, sinking his neck deep into the collar. “Shit, this is like the one time me and my cousins went explorin’ in this abandoned apartment complex when we was kids, an’ they’d all been there before but it was my first time, right, little damn ten-year-old me, and we get to the middle of the place an’ I turn around an’ they’re all gone—”

“Tobias.”

“—just went and ditched me, the little schmucks, left me wanderin’ around in this big dark spooky place for an hour, I shoulda shown’em who was boss after—”

“ _Tobias_.”

“What?”

“We’re here.”

They had broken into a moon-lit clearing comprised mostly of messily hacked stumps. It was scarcely large enough to accommodate the only noticeable feature it had: a cramped-looking wood shack smaller than her own shed and in almost worse repair. Its windows had long since been reduced to jag-toothed mouths. Its wood and sheet-metal roof was dented and full of holes, littered with woodland debris. The door hung outward. One wall had caved in, and within was nothing more than an old pot-bellied stove and a rusted mattress frame, just recognizable when she shined her light on them. The whole structure was surrounded by a dirt trench. There was nothing but silence; not even the wind blew.

Tobias knit his brow. “You wanted to show me this?” He looked kind of disappointed. She wondered why.

“Sort of,” she said. Her fingers wouldn’t keep still, playing along the trigger of her new toy, caressing its metal belly. Forcing patience, she left him to circle the structure, lighting up everything with the flashlight. No one hiding themselves away in there. Good.

“What’s with the trench?” asked Tobias as she rejoined him.

“You’ll see,” she said, and turned the flashlight off. She tossed it to the ground, and flicked the flamethrower’s switch. The pilot light sputtered into being.

A shudder of anticipation ran along her back, and she planted her feet. When she pointed the flamethrower upwards and tested it, letting off a short burst of fire, it finally clicked for him. “Waittaminute, you’re—”

The only answer he got was a huge grin thrown over her shoulder, wilder and brighter than she’d ever given him before, brighter even than the day he had shown her the sparkler. She pulled the trigger, and the flamethrower rumbled, then hissed to life.

The blaze exploded outward, a solid ten feet, before settling back to a more modest five. The fire landed first on the outstretched door, and then it spread. It rushed down the cracked wood to the door frame and leapt onto the weather-stained wall. It crawled toward the roof, and it was drowned in more fire as the flamethrower belched airy streams of heat at it in every direction.

In no time at all, the whole thing was alight. She circled it over and over, every step measured and careful, like a medicine woman in the midst of a ritual. Smoke floated up in a heavy pillar, and the timbers were cracking. It blazed madly in the dark, dancing, beautiful and glorious Fire.

The girl only stopped when the propane ran out, the living dragon in her hands reduced to a pilot light and an empty metal shell. But that was fine. It had been an utter success, after all. She switched it off, set the machine down by the flashlight, and—finally—relaxed.

She sat down cross-legged next to where Tobias had sunk down onto the ground, her expression dreamy. Relief had swept through her like a wind the moment she’d seen the thing start to burn. All the tension was seeping out of her now as the fire blazed, the anxiety and exhaustion that had been building up from every sleepless night lifting from her shoulders. The migraine that had been lurking in the back of her skull all day was gone. She felt light-headed and giddy, even post-orgasmic. Fire was better than sex any day. There would be no nightmares for her tonight.

Then Tobias blurted, “That’s arson.”

She blinked, and the afterimage of the fire burned against her eyelids. Sleepily she turned to look at him. “Hm?”

“That, that-that-that’s arson, right?” he said again, back rigid.

A twinge of annoyance went through her. “No.”

“You set fire to somebody’s thing, arson.”

She sighed, and recited: “ ‘Arson: the willful and malicious act of setting fire to, burning, or causing a building _where people reside_ to be burned.’ “

He looked like a deer in headlights. “What?”

“That’s the legal definition of arson. And it’s not arson, because it wasn’t malicious, and no one lived there.”

“Okay but why do you know that?”

“I had a good lawyer.”

Tobias paused, a miracle in and of itself. “ . . . You gonna tell me that story?”

“Maybe later.”

He shook his head and gave no reply, and that suited her just fine. She curled up into herself, chin pressed to knees, and watched the fire burn.

The blaze had become immense. It had engulfed what was left standing, and licked at the edge of the dirt trench she had painstakingly made months ago, when she’d discovered the clearing and the shack. It wouldn’t do to have the whole woods go up, no matter how fantastic that sounded. Nothing had changed here in all that time, and it was far enough out that the smoke and light wouldn’t attract attention. She had been keeping it in the back of her mind for so long, waiting for the right timing, and it could not have come together more perfectly.

She had very nearly been lulled to sleep simply watching it when Tobias said, “So this—like, the fire—this is what you wanted to show me?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“So this got somethin’ to do with what you said about fire calmin’ you down the other day?”

“I guess.”

Silence. Then: “Alright, so then what’s eatin’ ya? I mean this is kinda a big friggin’ fire, big fire for a big deal?” He was watching her intently. When she said nothing after a minute or two, he ventured, “You still havin’ those nightmares?”

“You still a nosy son of a bitch?”

“You better believe it.”

She laughed despite herself. “I don’t know, how’s your sleep?”

“It’s gettin’ better, I guess.” He leaned forward and plucked up a green twig from the ground to spin between his fingers. “When I was a kid my gramps was livin’ with us and he had real bad insomnia. I always thought, damn, he don’t gotta sleep! You waste so much friggin’ time sleepin’, you know? That must be great, havin’ insomnia gives you so much time.” He tossed the twig into the blaze and shook his head. “Turns out it just makes you feel like shit.”

“No kidding.”

The roof of the shack finally caved in, red-hot metal dropping down onto the charred wood. It settled there at a jaunty angle, like an absurd hat. The girl reached out and tugged the flamethrower closer, stroking it like someone might pet a dog. “It’s the same kind of nightmare every time for me.”

“Drowning, right?”

She nodded. “Drowning. Different ways.”

“Ways, like . . . what?”

“Sometimes I’m at the bottom of the lake and my feet are weighted. Or I’ll be at the bottom of a pit filling up with rain. Or there’ll be a flash flood and I can’t get to higher ground.”

“Jesus,” Tobias said. He had pulled out his Zippo and finally re-lit his cigarette. “How long you been gettin’ those?” he asked, taking a drag.

A sigh rattled through her ribcage. “You got another cig?”

Wordlessly, Tobias pulled out his pack of Newports and handed it over. She picked out a cylinder, thought a moment, then leaned over and flicked the flamethrower’s switch. The pilot light hissed into life, and she carefully lit the cigarette on it before turning the contraption off again. She put it to her lips, pulled in the smoke to breathe it out again, and said, “Since my family kicked it.”

Tobias said, “Oh,” very quietly, and after a long pause.

“Mmph. Car went off the road during a bad storm. Hydroplaned, dove right off a bridge.” She sucked in more smoke. “I was, I dunno, five. My brother got me out of a window before it sank.” Shifting, she leaned back onto one hand and glanced at him for just a moment, gauging his reaction. “Did the whole orphanage thing, got the boot a couple years later.”

“Shit, I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

She rolled her shoulders in a shrug. “Sorry doesn’t do anything.”

Tobias didn’t answer, and she didn’t go on. Instead, they watched the shack until it smoldered into embers, nothing more than a blackened mess of tin and ashes. When the last of the smoke had begun to die, she flicked her cigarette into the embers, cracked her neck, and stood. Tobias joined her, stretching out his lanky limbs. “Hey,” he said, and then hesitated. He swallowed, straightened up, and went on: “So uh, hey, y’know tomorrow’s the fourth.” His hands were fidgeting in front of him as she picked up her flamethrower and the flashlight, turning the latter on. “Of July,” he added.

“Uh-huh.”

“I been hearin’ there’s gonna be the biggest damn fireworks show Boston’s ever seen after the Pops finishes up. Uh, y’, y’know the Pops, right? Big ol’ orchestra, always plays on the fourth?”

She wrinkled her nose, leading him out into the woods again. “I’ve lived in Boston for three years, ‘course I know about the Pops. I can hear them all the way to my house.”

“Oh, cool,” he said, catching up to walk alongside her. “So I was thinkin’, kind of a big deal, once-inna-lifetime kinda thing, right, and uh, so . . . you wanna, like, go see the fireworks? Wit’ me?”

She thought about it. There’d be monstrous crowds. Noise. “No, not really.”

Tobias deflated as dramatically as a balloon. “Uh, well uh alright,” he started, but she interrupted: “I was going to set off the ones you sold me. The fireworks. You can come, if you want.”

“Yeah?” he chirped, brightening at once.

“Sure.”

He had gone from uneasy to disappointed to eager all in under thirty seconds. Already he was launching into another full-blown, one-sided chatter as they walked back to her house. What a strange boy.


	5. Bomb

The gate creaked as she leaned first forward and then back, its rusted hinges complaining as she pulled it around. Tobias would find his way in, she was sure. Then she trotted into the shed and pulled out as many fireworks as she could carry in one trip, fireworks of all kinds: little ones, big ones, snaps and sparklers and roman candles and three truly monstrous bottle rockets.She nearly dropped the whole collection twice before she made it to the middle of her dirt yard, next to where she’d kept the flamethrower after spending the day fine-tuning it. Here she left them, and ducked back into the house as evening drew on.

When Tobias wandered in through her gate and then her open door, about five minutes later, he found her muttering angrily under her breath. A plastic cup sailed past him. “Fuck,” she hissed, whirling, and stopped dead as their eyes met. “Uh.”

Tobias lifted one eyebrow, pulling one hand out from his varsity jacket to wave at her. The dog tags were back today. “Hey-o, firebug.” He leaned back on his heels. “Problem?”

She regained her composure quickly. “Lost something,” was all she said, stalking past him.

He leaned over her shoulder as much as he dared, watching her tear through empty drawers and rifle through old boxes. “Lost what?”

“My lighter.”

Tobias’s gaze cut to the prodigious collection of lighters strewn along the top of a coffee table that stood in one corner of the room. There were dozens of them, Zippos, BICs, a rainbow of Clippers, and more unidentifiable to the untrained eye. “Somethin’ wrong with those?”

“They’re not right,” she ground out.

“Whas’ that mean?”

“They just aren’t _right_. I need the god-damn 1948 Zippo with the eagle on it and it’s not anywhere.”

He squinted at her. “Why the hell does it gotta be that one?”

“I can’t just use any old lighter,” she said acidly, throwing the drawer shut with a bang. “It’s bad luck.”

“Bad luck,” Tobias snorted. “You superstitious or something, really? You?”

She didn’t answer, and instead stormed deeper into the candle-lit house. Tobias followed a respectful few paces behind as she dug through her sparse belongings, watching her grow angrier with every passing moment. She had just gone into her own room and resorted to upturning everything in there (not behind the books, not under the traffic cone, not beneath the bed) when Tobias held something up in front of her face. “Look, just use mine.”

It was his Zippo. She glared at it, and then at him. He shrugged, waving it at her a little. With an exasperated grumble she snatched it out of his hands. It was the 1951 model she’d suspected after all, cool to the touch and dented everywhere. The engraving on one side was so worn down and scuffed as to be nigh-illegible, but she could just make out a word and a number: _Psalm 23_. She knew that one: _The_ **LORD** _is my shepherd, I shall not want_. She’d heard it in the orphanage.

A lot.

It left a bad taste in her mouth.

“That fine?” Tobias said.

“No,” she answered, throwing it back at him. He scrambled to catch it while she investigated the top shelf of her closet, and had just slipped it back into his breast pocket when she growled and grabbed one of the books of matches from the overstuffed purse. “I’ll just use these.”

“Cool,” Tobias said. He’d picked up her gas mask and was turning it over. “Where’d y’get this?”

“Flea market. World War II, S6 NBC respirator, British standard-issue. Tinted lenses. Still works.”

“No foolin’, huh. Crazy.” Tobias put the black rubber to his face, and the straps hung down around his ears. “Mhow d’I luk?”

“Creepy,” she snorted. “Come on.”

When they got back outside, it was fully dark. She sat herself down next to the pile of fireworks and Tobias finally took off the gas mask, tossing it down by the flamethrower. He whistled, long and low. “I gotta say I ain’t never seen a pile this big outside’a work. That ain’t even half what you bought, is it?”

She shook her head, already fighting open the packaging of the selfsame box of sparklers Tobias had opened for her just a few weeks ago. She thought it was the same one, anyway, though there were several more like it scattered on the ground. She might’ve bought too many. Impulse purchasing had always been a flaw of hers. But really, what else was she going to buy? Clothes? No. This was a much better use of her dwindling funds.

She plucked out a red sparkler and spun it slowly between her fingers. It needed to be appreciated. They were such marvelously simple devices! Just wire and some pyrotechnic composite. Add a flame and you get a booming, crackling vision of beauty, a flower in fast-forward. There wasn’t anything that couldn’t be improved with fire in some form, she was pretty sure.

Then she pulled out four more, and lit them all at once.

Tobias whooped, and she passed him one (a little begrudgingly) when he held out his hand. “Watch this,” he said, backing up, and began to paint the dark.

Tiny sparks flew, and it took her time and some squinting at the smoke to realize he was writing his name in the air. Then he wrote hers. He was halfway into what she assumed was meant to be “HI MOM” when his sparkler burned out, and hers followed shortly after. “Talent,” she said dryly, lighting two more and passing them over. He gave her a gapped grin.

“I been doin’ sparkler tricks for my brothers since I was like twelve, awright, best in th’business.” He flicked his wrists, and the sparklers twirled in his fingers. He kept twisting them as he talked, burning afterimages into her eyes. “An’ my boss Chaz, he’s this nutter right, been doin’ fireworks since the forties. Hoo-ee, crazy son of a bitch right there. I think he’s doin’ the show after the Pops tonight, actually, part of it. Oh man, no, wait wait there was this one time I was with Chaz an’ some’a my brothers—”

He cut himself off with his own squall as he fumbled, the sparklers shotgunning a spray of stars over his shirt and face. He threw his hands up in a panic, and the sticks spun away from him in a mesmerizing cartwheel—right toward the pile of tightly-packed gunpowder and bright paper. “Oh, shit—”

She watched them fall, beautiful and dangerous. Without quite deciding she was going to, she reacted. She reached out and snatched the burning metal from the air.

For one white-hot instant there was nothing else in the world but her and the fireworks. She was holding them upside-down, and they spat bright sparks down her wrists. Her hands were doused in light and color, made new by the fire. The rest of her seemed as dull as ditch water by comparison. The way it lit her skin turned it gilded, beautiful. It was the Big Bang. It was Genesis, it was holding the Holy Grail between her fingers. It took her breath away.

Then her nerves came alive with screaming agony, and with a hoarse cry she flung the blazing metal aside. They landed in a patch of dirt some ten feet away to sputter out harmlessly. The pain felt like it was everywhere, frying her every vein and synapse.

She jerked her hands close to herself, and then held perfectly still, not sure if she could have moved more if she wanted to. Eons passed, and slowly, it faded. She became aware that Tobias was cussing up a storm: “—fuckin’ hell, are you alright, oh my God—”

Delicate, she put her hands where she could see them. Even in the near-dark she could make out two livid, angry lines of red crisscrossing each palm, with more rising up on her fingers. Pain splintered through her senses, dizzying her. She was breathing strangely, in a tight, tense way. Burns never felt any less awful no matter how many you got. “I’ll be fine,” she eked out, once she could speak again. “Shit. Water. Burns go under water.”

“Water? Okay, I, uh—freakin’, shit, tell me what to do,” Tobias said, skittish and putting her on edge with his stress. “I ain’t never done no doctorin’.”

“I—okay, there’s a. A spigot on the side of the house.” She shut her eyes hard, denying the threatening tears. “Fuck. Come on.”

He followed her like a lost puppy to the spigot and the tarnished blue bucket under it. It was rusted and creaked at Tobias’s efforts to wrench it open, but gave at last after he gave it a particularly nasty snarl and a vicious twist. The water sputtered out weakly, and she stuck her hands beneath it. “Sit down,” she told Tobias, who was fidgeting like mad, wringing his hands like a nervous housewife, “it’s going to be a while.”

Sit he did, long arms slung over his knees. It only took him a few seconds to start to mess with the dog tags around his neck, his hands apparently desperate for something to do. For her part, she pressed her forehead against the cool metal of the spout and closed her eyes. The water slipped down between her fingers, awful and clammy, but the immediate pain was beginning to dull.

The jingle of his dog tags being rubbed together faded after a minute or so, and Tobias said, “I’m sorry.”

“Mmph.”

“Really. I shoulda been the one got burned.”

She opened one eye to look at him. “Keep trying, it’ll happen.”

He gawked back at her in surprise for a moment, and then laughed, a little. “Could be.”

They fell again into silence, and a few minutes later came the first faint sounds of the Boston Pops in the distance. Only the heaviest bass booms and loudest trumpet-squalls reached their ears, leaving them with a staccato impression of a half-forgotten rhythm, the remnants of some ghostly parade.

“Sparklers are a lot more dangerous than just straight fire,” she said aloud, after the band had gotten just loud enough to almost find the melody of. She pulled her hands out from the water, inspecting them. “They get you closer than you should be by being fascinating.”

“I guess so,” said Tobias.

She got up, slow and clumsy for lack of the use of her hands. Tobias rose, too, and looked as if he was prepared to clear the water pump to grab her if she fell. When she didn’t (thankfully), and instead headed back toward the unsteady light that marked her doorway, he turned the spigot off and followed.

When he got inside, she was leaning against her counter-top, gingerly rubbing lotion between her palms. She didn’t look up when he came in, just sighed and said, “There’s gauze in that cabinet over there. Get that, please. No, the other one. Yeah.” When he gave it to her, she wrapped it around her hands and each individual digit without so much as wincing. Tobias watched in silent fascination until she tucked the last length of cloth into itself. She flexed her fingers in an experimental way, and then dropped her arms to her sides. “Okay,” she breathed at last.

“Okay?”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

“Wha, jus’ like that?”

She glanced at him, visibly confused. “Yes . . . ?”

“Yeah but your hands!”

Looking down at her gauze-swathed hands, she lifted one eyebrow. “I still have them. Look,” she said, wiggling her fingers at him, “they work and everything. Come on.” And, saying this, she went back outside, leaving Tobias scratching his head in her kitchen. He joined her a minute or so later, hands shoved in his pockets and with an odd look on his face.

They lit and watched most of the remaining fireworks in a relative silence that eventually warmed back into Tobias’s waterfall voice over the next twenty minutes, until the used-up shells and boxes were forming a kind of nest around the flamethrower and the gas mask.

All that was left were the bottle rockets. They were huge, over half the girl’s height and as thick as her forearm, and she eagerly planted all three of them in an angled row while Tobias told her about the time his youngest brother faced down four guys twice his size with nothing but a baseball bat and a wrapped fish, and won. She scarcely heard the story; even hurt, her fingers were itching to light rockets, watch them soar. She was crouched down and adjusting the second one for the third time when Tobias, who had finished his story (or just stopped, she wasn’t sure) and was now just watching her quietly, said, “Hey, where’re the rest’a the fireworks?”

She paused, concentration broken. “Uh. In the shed. I’ll grab them in a minute.”

“Nah, I’ll get ‘em,” he said, standing.

It took her a moment to realize he’d offered. “ . . . Sure,” she said finally, after straightening out the fuse on the third one. “They’re uh. Oh, they’re pretty obvious, you’ll see ‘em.”

When she looked up again, he was already across the yard. She couldn’t remember if he’d said anything more.

One more ten-degree twist, and she was finally satisfied with her work. She pulled out a book of matches from her jacket and struck one, clumsy with the gauze but careful enough.

She reached forward and lit each rocket, reverent. The fires fizzled and hissed, taking ages to climb up the fuses, and she ached with impatience as she put out the match. Sighing, she shifted her weight, and then paused—the second rocket still wasn’t aligned properly. She bit her lip, looking at the length of the fuses—yes, she’d have time. There was time yet.

With both hands she carefully twisted the middle rocket a bit more yet, and discovered the whole stick was slightly bent. Irritated, she reached down to try and fix it, forgetful of the fuse itself.

There—nearly—

The flame sputtered, and coughed up a collection of sparks onto her hands.

She jerked away, more from surprise than pain, and in doing so knocked the whole thing out of alignment, its nose horizontal. “Fuck,” she snarled aloud, and now the fuse had grown dangerously short, but she tried again anyway. She pulled it up two full inches before she realized it was too late.

The fuses shrank up into the fireworks, and great tails of sparks gushed out over the sticks and her hands. She yelped in shock when the sparks nested in her gauze like fireflies. With a terrific shriek all three of the rockets took off, lighting up the night sky. They were all too low, she realized. She’d overestimated the lift. Not a disaster in and of itself, but the middle one—

It was the middle one that exploded across the lawn at a fifteen-degree angle and slammed directly into the roof of her shed.

Her heart nearly stopped. Time stood still as she watched, all else forgotten as the shed shuddered. Its whole structure, already weak from age and neglect, could not bear even that little stress. The rocket had partially embedded itself in the shingles, the flares still driving it forward. She heard something within give a cannon-loud _crack_ , and then the walls gave way.

The crash was so loud it nearly drowned the other sound that came in the same instant, something loud and chilling. For a moment she wondered if she had made it, but it came again from within the collapsed timbers, piercing and _scared,_ and she remembered:

“ _Tobias!_ ”

She was up and running. She was not five feet away when what was left of the building exploded. Every propane tank, every bottle of lighter fluid, all the firewood and kindling and remaining fireworks she had been so careful with for so long erupted outward and upward. The burst of fire it made stretched out across the yard like a monstrous hand, seizing everything it could: the plants, the vines on the fence, the roof of her house. Hell had opened up around her. The noise deafened her, and the force threw her to the ground, clothes and hair and skin aflame. Wooden debris and cement rained onto the dirt all around her, slamming into the earth with horrid shattering sounds.

It was no longer night. The blaze had lit up the sky, and thick smoke rose up like a heavy, ashen cloak. The shriek of the fireworks drowned out every other kind of noise. They were going off all at once, screaming like unholy things. Her whole world had become an inferno, and it was trying to swallow her up: she was blinded by the smog, and choked on it, and she couldn’t hear Tobias anymore.

She tore the gauze from her hands and stripped off her burning jacket, flinging it to the ground. It took far too long to beat the flames off the rest of her, and by then so much more than just her palms and fingers were seared to an angry, seething red. Her eyes ran freely from smoke and shock. Fear gripped her like iron shackles. She looked up at the bones of the burning shed.

The fire looked back at her. It looked into her. It was huge, an imperious blaze outstripping anything she had ever seen before. It made the fire she’d set last night look like a match, a lantern-flame. It was yards up in the air, too hot to approach, heartbreakingly beautiful. The wind had picked up, and lashed it about, sparks falling like snow. This was something treading near the divine. Her mind had gone empty with its power. She had found her god, and hers was a god of wrath.

Then another explosion threw more flaming timber at her, and she scrambled away, shaken from her reverie. The fire was growing, faster and faster. It had consumed half her house now, was chewing through the dry brush of her yard. She staggered to her feet, gasping and pained. She stumbled backwards, tripped over something that had not been there a minute ago, fell down hard.

A thing was lying there. It was heavy and dark and burning, longer than she was tall. Her legs were draped over it at an awkward, uncomfortable angle. Timber from the shed, she thought. The explosion must have hurled it here. Then she rubbed her eyes and looked again. No, not wood. It almost looked curled up on itself, and it was too lumpy and soft to be wood. She pulled herself off it, and realized it had a face.

It lay in a tangled-up, sideways sort of way, slouched with a bony shoulder jutting into the air, like it was propped up on something. It didn’t move when she knelt at its side, hand shaking more than she thought it should be. It didn’t move when she touched it. It didn’t move when she said his name.

The thing did nothing.

Something familiar and suffocating and electric was settling over her. Not revulsion—not fear—something else. “Tobias,” she said again. “Tobias, hey.”

The thing did nothing.

She sat back on her heels, mind reeling. Her head was filling up with static, pressure. She looked around, and there was her flamethrower, in its nest of used-up fireworks. Next to it sat the gas mask. She leaned over and grabbed the latter, pulling it over her face. Suddenly she could breathe again, and the whole world got dimmer, blurrier. Less real. Less real was good.

She looked back at the thing. It was still burning, low and steady, feeding the demon she had unleashed. She lifted one hand, as if to put the fire out, and stopped. She let her palm hover in the air for a few seconds before slowly dropping it down to her knee. No. No, she couldn’t.

It had Tobias’s clothes on. It had his long limbs and his dog tags and probably his hockey-player grin. But it wasn’t Tobias. She found it hard to believe it had ever been Tobias at all. What skin it had left was charred to black and red, and what wasn’t exposed skin was exposed muscle. Fractured rebar tunneled through its abdomen, more unidentifiable metal bit down deep into its hip and bicep and thigh. Something dark soaked its clothing, dribbled thickly down its forehead, glistening on its way out the thing’s mouth and nose. Its shredded face was pressed halfway against the ground, and the side of its head she could see was missing its ear—it was simply gone, and in its stead was a slowly congealing mass of burnt hair and viscera.

She reached out and pulled it onto its back, carefully. Heavy and limp, it rolled into position without any sort of protest, not even a sound. Nearly a foot of splintered wood, big around as her fist, was lodged deep in its unmoving chest. Scant threads of fabric stuck to the timber, like thin and blackened cobwebs; the rest of the letterman jacket was charred past recognition.

Her stomach lurched once, violently and without permission. She had to steady herself against the ground. But it passed, and when it passed, all she felt was calm, serene. It lilted through her bones and soothed her nerves. It was a strange kind of calm, dense, thick. The sort that comes before thunder.

Her mind was endless, snowy television noise, finally at ease. It dawned on her, sitting there, that there wasn’t a bus driver yelling at her to move. That was the difference this time. No one panicking in her ear. No one to tell her what to do, how to react. Lacking this, she found all she was inclined to do was . . . was watch. Watch the hair curl into black ash, the clothing dissolve, the flesh melt. Her own private pyre.

So she did, half-believing it might open its eyes. What if it did? What would she do?

But it didn’t. It never would again, she supposed. Half an hour ago, the thing had been Tobias, juggling sparklers and worrying over her.

Now it was just a limp, heavy _thing,_ made of meat and bone and hot, crackling fat.

She watched the fire grow on it, the gas mask blocking out most of the sour smell that was starting to thicken the air. There was a bulge under its breast pocket. Carefully, she reached inside to find the lighter she had thrown at the old Tobias, the real Tobias: the Zippo with _Psalm 23_ engraved on one side. It was warm to the touch, and she pocketed it, not really thinking about why. Instead she thought about how what she was doing was completely fucked up. How it didn’t bother her.

She was definitely supposed to be upset.

Around her, the fire blazed. The fireworks had stopped their howling, and there was no sound other than the lightning-noise of the fire as it ate its way through everything she ever owned or cared about. Once she glanced up at her house, reduced to a light show, and wondered if she could have stopped it, but she made no move to get up. There wasn’t anything she could do now, after all. The Fire that had driven back her nightmares and kept her warm and safe for so many years was taking its due from her.

Later, she would think if she had run when she meant to—before she found the thing that was not Tobias—she probably would have been long gone by the time the fire department and police arrived. As it was, she didn’t even hear the trucks pull up. Her first warning that anyone else had arrived was someone’s shout, garbled words she couldn’t make out through her mask. She looked up, and saw dark figures running through her open gate.

In a heartbeat all the eerie serenity she had gathered to her vanished. Her head swam as she jerked herself to her feet. The figures yelled more, barking like upright animals.

She realized she was going for her flamethrower a few seconds after she had actually picked it up. She was flicking the pilot light’s switch, spinning on her heel. There they were, four blurry black shapes howling things she couldn’t understand at her, holding formless weapons.

Under her mask she snarled, temper flaring, gasoline on a fire. Her own cry bounced around the inside of the mask until it echoed back to her as something inhuman, something feral. She stepped over the thing that had never been Tobias, standing over it like some ancient guardian might, and planted her feet. The black things seemed to waver, and she wondered if they were real. If they weren’t real, then it was fine.

If they were real, then—well. That was fine, too, really.

Without a second thought, she pulled the trigger.


	6. Interlude I.

 

There is a pain — so utter —  
It swallows substance up —  
Then covers the Abyss with Trance —  
So Memory can step  
Around — across — upon it —  
As one within a Swoon —  
Goes safely — where an open eye —  
Would drop Him — Bone by Bone.

—Emily Dickinson.


	7. Stray

 

**May 1 st, 1968**

May, in Texas.

May in Texas meant trout lilies blooming, robins and purple martins and grackles crowding one another for space on the telephone wires, and more insects than hairs on your head. The air was not yet doing its best impersonation of an oven. It was the respite before summer, when trucks would become murder to ride in and delicate machinery would grow to its most cantankerous.

For one man, May in Texas meant going home to his modest little property in the tiny town of Bee Cave—a much-needed few weeks’ break from his job.

Tonight he was camped out in his overstuffed arm chair, enjoying the quiet. Quiet was hard to get at his job. So was quality food; he was no great cook, being a bachelor and all, but fixing his own meals at his own pace had an undeniable pleasure to it. Leftover chicken and baked beans lay on the scratched plate atop the end-table by his chair, and he had settled down to pick through the newspaper and have a nice, solitary evening.

The first interruption came by way of the telephone. The dusty black Crosley, which sat near at hand atop the table, started to ring. Without so much as looking up from his paper he answered it. “Evenin’,” he began, tucking it between his ear and shoulder. “Conagher speakin’.”

“Evenin’, Dell, it’s Jackson.”

Dell Conagher turned the page, scanning the articles. New hospital, grand opening. Hollywood wedding in an upset. Australia invents first-ever wallaby-powered television, immediately begins research toward weaponizing the same. “How’s things, Jackson?”

“Oh, fine, jus’ fine. Lissen, I hate to be callin’ you up after dinner and all, but somethin’s up with that milking contraption y’all put together for me.”

“What’s it doing?” Black Ice Stadium fire kills twenty-three. New police department, grand opening.

“I can’t say I’m exactly sure, but when I went to check on ‘em tonight I found Belle doin’ the thing with her horns all glowin’-like. Blue. Lit up just like Christmas.”

Dell lifted an eyebrow. “Again?” Oil prices up four percent. Fatal crash, two persons dead.

“Yep. She seems fine, ain’t no rush, but next you’ve got a minute . . . ”

“Sure thing, fella. I can make it over tomorrow ‘round noon if that’ll do.”

“That’ll do fine. See you.”

“See you.” Jackson hung up, and the place was quiet again.

The second interruption, the real trouble, well—it came in through the window, in a way. The air was warm and crisp that evening, and he had permitted the breeze to flow in through the mesh screen. It slid around now like a snake, rustling the books and sundries scattered around the living room. It paused to lick at the paintings and photographs and investigated no fewer than eleven framed Ph.D.s that hung on the walls. It wound through a tiny sculpture of an oil well, and rolled around the scraps on his plate; it nudged his paper, investigated his worn-out overalls, and skimmed his bald scalp before dying back down.

The point of the matter, anyway, was that the window was open. There’d been nothing else but the soft sounds of birds and the rustle of the cotton plants coming in through that window all evening; when he heard something else, something like a thump and muted footsteps, he put the paper down. Peering outside showed him nothing, but the sound continued, then stopped, replaced by a soft hiss. Dell rubbed his chin, shut the window, and stepped out to the kitchen. He cricked his neck once, twice, and pulled on his boots. His shotgun was waiting for him in the closet by the door, as it always was. He hefted it up, its weight easy and familiar in his hands, and stepped outside.

The rich colors of a Texan sunset painted the horizon. Around him rolled the unkempt shrub land that defined his property, and beyond that stood his neighbors’ endless acres of cotton, rows of tiny clouds bound to earth. Looking around, he found nothing immediately out of the ordinary. The hissing noise had stopped—no—there it was again, louder.

Something moved at the edge of his vision. He turned sharply, lifting the gun, and found it was only the German Shepherd rounding the corner of the house. It stopped in its tracks, tail wagging. Dell relaxed again, slung the gun over his shoulder, and whistled to it, short and low. All business, it fell in step at his side as he slowly went the very way it had come. Some thirty yards from the house stood his garage-cum-workshop, locked and dark. His truck sat out in front of it, untouched. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

He listened. The leaves of the ancient ash tree, standing like a sentinel on the opposite side of the house, rustled gently in the breeze. The hiss had faltered, sputtered out of being again. Somewhere came a faint, metallic thumping, and soon it gave way to more hissing. “Dog,” he said softly. The German Shepherd looked up at him, ears perked. “Find ‘em.”

The dog took off at a brisk, stiff-legged trot, spine straight as a board. Dell waited where he stood, waiting to see if the hiss would change. For a long time, there was nothing.

He was about to give up and head back inside when a sharp bark cut through the air. It was followed by a muffled shout, and he was moving. The dog’s growls led him to the other side of the house, where the tree stood. He turned the corner, and stopped short.

Just two or three feet away from him was a figure trying to wrench its pant leg away from the dog’s jaws, issuing a mumbling trail of what he assumed to be curses. The first thing he noticed was the mask—a black gas mask, eerie and cast with strange shadows in the fading light, scuffed all over and missing one tinted lens. The next was the bizarre, long-necked contraption clenched tight in its gloved hands, something bright and tiny glowing at one end. Any other detail was consumed by the nearing dark.

The shotgun’s safety made a loud _click_ as he disengaged it. The stranger froze. They turned to look at him, and he could just make out one clouded eye through the empty eyepiece. In the same moment, the dog let go of their leg and backed off. It knew that noise.

“Buddy,” he said, real gentle, “I would suggest you put that whatever-it-is down.”

The stranger just stared at him. Their eye cut from him to the dog and back again. Then, in one jerky motion that reminded him of something more animatronic than human, they had swung the machine upwards. It leveled with Dell’s face, and he jerked backwards in alarm. “Hey!” he snapped, his grip tightening on the gun. But the stranger did nothing else.

The tiny glowing thing on the end of the machine pressed heat to his face, more blue than orange. A fire, he realized, steady and intense as a Bunsen burner. Dell took a slow, steady breath. “I’m gonna ask you once more. Put that thing _down_.”

The stranger said something that sounded a lot like “Fuck you,” and pulled the trigger.

In a rush of heat and light the machine belched a burst of flame at him, inches from his face. He lurched backwards, and the dog let loose a thundering bark, jumping forward with bared teeth. But then the fire cut short, stopping abruptly with a sad gurgle. The tiny light flickered, then went out. He heard something on the contraption click, then click again, and again, to no avail. The stranger stared at the thing in what he only assumed to be bafflement, their attention all at once completely removed from him. They raised a fist and thumped the machine hard, once, twice. Nothing happened—no, a piece of it swung off, then fell to the ground. The dog barked again.

The stranger sagged visibly, like a deflating balloon. They took an uncertain step backwards, then sank to the ground, wrapping their arms around the machine like one would a beloved pet. Dell was ignored entirely. They curled up around it, hunched and small, and after a few seconds of utter silence he realized their shoulders were shaking. Were they crying? Or laughing?

The dog had come to stand at his side. He glanced down at it for an instant, and when he looked back at the stranger they had lifted their head. The one eye he could see blinked, hard, and then looked him dead in the eye with a crazed, unflinching gaze. The voice that rattled out of the empty eyepiece was so muffled and smoke-damaged that he couldn’t even tell if its owner was a man or a woman. “So hurry up and fucking shoot me, then.”

“I have no desire to use this unless I’ve got to,” he answered, lowering the barrel.

They stared back at him with that solitary, hollow eye. “Fuck you,” they repeated, but the words had no feeling behind them. The stranger shuddered and wrapped themselves around the machine again, all their joints sticking out in harsh angles.

The dog’s curiosity had consumed it. It slunk in closer, head down and sniffing. It investigated the machine, and then the gloved fingers that held it. One of the stranger’s hands jerked, then settled on the dog’s shoulder. They glanced up from the weapon and watched the dog a moment before gingerly pushing it away. A rattling sigh found its way out of the mask. “It’s dead.”

“Pardon?”

“My flamethrower.” They hugged it tighter. “It’s dead, it died. I couldn’t fix it. I _tried_. I looked for parts but there aren’t any and I don’t have any tools and nowhere to work anymore anyway and it’s _dead_ and I couldn’t do anything about it.” As they spoke, they sagged down further and further, until they were slumped against the machine like a dead thing. “Oughta shoot me. I was going to burn your house down. I almost had it but it wouldn’t spread right. Then I was gonna go burn all that.” They made a wild gesture to the acres of cotton.

After all that, he’d heard enough of the rasping voice to suppose it was a woman’s. Dell chewed his lip, glanced at the side of his house. Sure enough, there was a smoldering collection of scorched grass next to the wall. “Now why were you gonna go and do that?”

“It’s _dead_ ,” they said again, in a tiny, shattered voice.

Minutes passed in silence, and after a while Dell slung his gun over his shoulder and made a decision. Gingerly, he reached out and grabbed the machine’s nozzle, still warm from the flame, and gave it an experimental tug. Truth be told, he expected the stranger—the arsonist—to spring up when he touched it, like a coyote guarding a meal. But there was nothing. Her arms fell away and he picked it up with ease. Hefting it under one arm, he gave her one last look before turning to leave: she looked like a puppet with its strings cut, a collection of bones in a heap.

The dog followed him as he left her to her sorrows. It trailed him all the way to his garage, and darted into the darkness when he unlocked the door with a key fished from his pocket. Flicking on the light, he set down the gun on a nearby workbench and finally allowed himself to examine the weapon, the way he’d been itching to since he saw it.

He’d never seen anything like it; you certainly couldn’t get something like this in a store. Custom-made, then, cobbled together carefully with clear signs of hand-done soldering and appropriated parts. He imagined when it was new it had been quite the specimen, but time had worn away at it. Now it was a tired old thing, a fossil, with tarnished metal and fraying tubing. The propane tank on its side was cratered and scratched, eaten with rust. Its handle, a cleverly repurposed gas pump, had been black at some point; it had seen so much use that much of the paint had worn away, revealing faint blue beneath. But even its skeleton was something of a masterpiece, a relic of clever craftsmanship. He was impressed, and that was rather saying something.

Had she built this?

Shaking his head, he stowed it atop one of the dozens of shelving units that lined the garage. He went to dig out a tarp to cover it, and something in the half-darkness beeped at him. “Just me, darlin’,” he said absently. The beep came again, like a quiet hello, and then stopped.

When he returned, herding out the dog and leaving the garage dark and locked behind him, she hadn’t moved an inch. He shifted his gun, slung over his shoulder once again, and scratched his head as he watched her. Vagrants weren’t something he’d ever had to deal much with. “When’s the last time you ate, missy?” he said, presently; it seemed like the decent thing to ask.

It took her a while, but she finally moved: jerky, slow, a wind-up toy of a person. She lifted her head. Her one visible eye blinked, slow. A few seconds later, she said, “Is it Sunday?”

“Tuesday.”

“Oh. Two . . . three days, then.” She let her head drop back down to her chest.

“Well,” he said. The dog was sniffing her again. It garnered no reaction. “Well. I expect you’re hungry, then.” He hesitated. “Believe I’ve got some chicken in the fridge, if you’d be interested.”

Nothing.

Dell sighed, tapping his fingers against the smooth barrel of the shotgun. “Ought ta turn you in to the sheriff, is what I ought ta do.” But he left her again, going inside. He put the shotgun back in its place, pulled the cold chicken on its plate out of the fridge, and went back out to the arsonist. He put it down on the grass beside her, watched her a few seconds longer, and said, “You eat that, then you decide what you feel like doin’. You need a place to sleep tonight, you come talk to me. Hear?” The dog was investigating the chicken, and he caught it by the collar. “But no more of this arson business. Not on my property. Or I _will_ shoot ya.”

She didn’t respond, and he went back inside, bringing the dog with him. He unlaced his boots, threw the dog one of the fat soup bones Jackson kept giving him, and returned to his chair.

Evening drew on. Dell had flicked on the old lamp and gotten most of the way through the paper when he heard the front door creak open. He stopped halfway through turning the page, listening. When the floorboards groaned under new weight and the dog was looking expectantly around the corner, he said aloud, “More chicken in the fridge.”

The door fell shut. A few seconds later, he heard the fridge open up. He nodded to himself, and went back to the paper.

The next sound Dell expected to hear was the door opening up again and the arsonist booking it with as much food as she could carry. It never came. What did come, a few minutes later, was the arsonist herself, standing in the space where the linoleum stopped and the carpet began.

In the light he could finally pick out the finer details of what, exactly, he had invited into his house. She stood in a slouch, head low, and even her smallest movements were lined with tension. Her clothes were huge on her, some of the rattiest things he had ever seen: hole-covered Levi’s, shoes that were more duct tape than anything else, a dark hooded sweatshirt torn in a dozen different places. Her hair was a hacked-off nest of knots and burrs, short as a boy’s, and a bruise-colored half-moon of sleeplessness was sunk deep beneath her eye. In her hands she held the blackberry pie that Mrs. Kelly over the way had given him a few days ago, a thank-you for fixing her husband’s car. A huge chunk of it was missing, and purple smeared her gloves.

He put down his paper, giving her his attention. Nothing was said. Her dead gaze went from the dog, to him, to his couch, and then back to him. Seconds ticked by. Dell looked at the couch for a moment, and eventually he picked the paper back up. “All yours.”

He got no acknowledgment. But when he glanced over the top of the paper a few minutes later, he found her curled up on the cushions, shoes, mask and all. She slouched heavily against the armrest, already dead asleep. The pie sat in her lap. The dog was licking the juice from her gloved fingers.

Dell shook his head. He rose, flipped off the light, and went upstairs to bed.

A few seconds later, he came back down, grabbed the shotgun, and took it up with him.


	8. Company

 

Dell had expected to come downstairs the next morning to find his belongings ransacked, his fridge emptied, and the arsonist long gone. The couch was empty, as he’d predicted, or at least mostly. The dog was sprawled on the cushions, licking at an empty pie tin.

When he found the arsonist was sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over something, it was kind of a shock. More than kind of. Her gas mask was still in place, though the gloves had been discarded, lying in a rumpled mess nearby. Just within reach sat an empty ceramic bowl. A whole mess of swiped paper was spread out on the table, covered in tiny sketches and notes. In her right hand she held a pencil, moving it carefully and urgently, and in her left she clutched a Zippo lighter that she flicked on and off, on and off, on and off.

It was like he’d found a wild animal in his kitchen. For the first few seconds he stood stock-still, even though her back was to him. When she did nothing but keep writing, he eased his way toward the fridge. He couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder to see the chicken-scratch she was making, and to his surprise found the papers covered in sketches, diagrams of something mechanical. He couldn’t identify it, couldn’t even begin to parse the shaky writing.

He was so absorbed in trying to decipher the nonsense that when she slammed the pencil down with a bang and a wild, frustrated noise, he flinched a lot worse than he might have otherwise. He remembered himself and stepped back a ways as she snatched up some of the pages, crumpled them, and shoved them into the bowl. A snap of metal and a flare from the Zippo later, the paper was burning. Dell raised an eyebrow.

She still hadn’t noticed him. Now she was staring intently at the blazing paper. As he watched, she slouched slowly forward onto the table, chin resting on folded arms.

“That ain’t no way to treat blueprints,” he observed, and she jumped so hard she banged her knee on the table. The lighter leapt out of her hand and tailspun across the linoleum, stopping only when it thumped against his bare foot. She barked something, some explosive, angry curse, when he knelt to pick it up.

It was scuffed, dented, warm from her touch. Rust and age had turned its casing the color of copper. He turned it over in his hand, and found etched lines, worn smooth from overhandling. _Psalm 23_ , it said, or used to say. Someone (the arsonist?) had scratched at the numbers until they more closely read _22:1_. Bible verses. Huh. Not what he’d expected to find.

The chair made a godawful shriek as it was scraped backwards, the arsonist bolting to her feet. “Give it back!” she snapped. Her muffled voice carried thunder.

“I will, I will,” he said, as placating as he could, closing the distance between them to return it. She ripped it from his outstretched hand, and then dropped down into the chair again, hunching over it like it was some precious jewel.

“Sorry,” Dell said after a while, when she did nothing more. “Didn’t mean to startle you none.”

“Go away,” she said petulantly.

“Pardon me, Smoky, but this does happen to be my house.”

That silenced her again. He sighed, and went back to getting his breakfast. The minutes passed, and only the soft crackle of burning paper could be heard. The arsonist had pocketed the lighter and pulled the bowl closer to her, gazing into it as if in a trance.

He got no more out of her after that, and she gathered up her things and vanished outside shortly after. For his part he went and did what he could to fix Jackson’s milking machine, and got Belle’s horn-glow down to something subtler. When he came back, no arsonist. There was neither hide nor hair of her the day after that, nor the next. On the fourth day, though, he came in from a trip to the store to find her sleeping fitfully on his couch. An emptied box of crackers and the remains of his stores of rock candy lay in a mess on the wood floor. In the morning, he found his garbage barrels thick with smoke, their contents ash. It rapidly became the same every night after, every banana peel or newspaper or molding leftover reduced to soot. But that was why the bins were metal, he supposed, so things could be burned in them.

The day after that he heard about the fire. A blaze had taken out most of Jackson’s shed, though it had been caught in time to spread no further. “When’d this happen?” Dell asked him over the phone that evening, eying the sleeping vagrant that had appeared on his couch yet again. The dog was tucked up in a tight circle by her feet.

“Oh, two days ago or like.”

“Huh. What d’ya think caused it?” His guest twitched in her sleep. “Arson, maybe?”

“Nah, figure one a’ the boys left a cig’rette by mistake. The Talbots lost their whole barn that way a few years back, ‘member that?”

“Sure I do,” Dell said, and that was all.

The arsonist, he soon realized, was similar to a stray cat—and he’d done the mistake of feeding her. Now she hung around, silent and strange, a phantom in a black jacket with torn-up shoes and a gas mask. They spoke little after that first day; once she asked him if he had any cigarettes, and when he said no she’d drawn up into herself and gone out onto the porch to sulk. She’d stood leaning against the railing all night, the only sign of life her compulsive on-off-on-off-on of the Zippo. It wasn’t until well past dark that she’d slouched back inside without so much as a how-do-you-do and flung herself down onto the couch, which had grown muddy and rumpled with her presence. And because he was a considerate man, Dell turned off the lamp, put down the book he’d been reading and went upstairs.

He’d stormed down again not three hours later, gun in hand and dog behind, summoned by a thump and an unearthly shriek. But he only found the arsonist, curled into a knot on the floor and shuddering. “I get nightmares,” she’d snarled when he asked what happened, surprising him by answering at all. “It’s none of your fucking business. Leave me alone.”

Tired, frustrated, he’d returned to bed. He didn’t sleep. Instead he sat up, thinking. The more he considered what he was doing, the more foolish it seemed. He was harboring a self-admitted arsonist, which dangerous enough in itself. He’d hidden his matches right quick after he discovered she’d decided to stick around. And that wasn’t even giving due consideration to the fact that she seemed to have more than a handful of things wrong upstairs, or that her attitude was nastier than a cottonmouth’s.

Dell glanced at the shotgun in the corner, where he’d returned it to rest. A sigh escaped him, unbidden. He couldn’t very well have left the arsonist where she was. Running her off likely would have meant it would be his neighbors’ properties going up in smoke—Jackson would have lost a lot more than his barn. He didn’t trust Bee Cave’s sheriff enough to turn her in; he’d not trusted that man since he’d stayed quiet during the lynching of Adam Calliper. And he’d really not been too fond of the idea of shooting her. That left him with very few options.

So here he was, letting a mad vagrant use his couch. That was Southern hospitality for you.

This carried on. He was dragged from sleep in the middle of the night no less than twice more, and she was always gone in the morning. But when he came down the stairs at 6 AM some time the next week, she was both awake and present. The dog sat at her feet. He could see her watching him from the empty lens.

Dell paused on the bottom step, taking this new turn of events in. “G’morning,” he said eventually. “Sleep well?”

“Where is it?” she answered, muted through the mask.

He blinked at her. She made an aggravated gesture. “My flamethrower,” she said. “I know you took it. Where the fuck is it?”

“Thought you said it was broke.”

Venom oozed from her one visible eye, nigh-tangible. “It’s _mine_.”

Sighing, he made his way to his armchair. It was too early for this. “And what do you plan on doin’ with it if you get your hands on it?” Predictably, he got no reply. He shook his head, leaning forward to rest his arms on his knees. “Missy, look. Let’s start over. Name’s Conagher. Dell Conagher. Pleasure meetin’ ya.” He held out a hand. “You got a name?”

“No.”

“You got somethin’ I can address you by, then?”

“No.” Dell let his hand drop and thanked God for his endless patience. “Where is it?”

He sighed again. “It’s safe. I ain’t done no harm to it.”

“It’s in that garage, isn’t it?” she pushed. “I’ve seen you go in there. The door’s always locked.”

Dell’s voice grew stern. “And it’s locked for a reason. You go bustin’ in there, you’re in for a world of trouble.” When she rolled her lone eye at him, he felt his face harden at once. “I am serious, ma’am.”

“That’s my property!” she snapped. “You stole it. You don’t want me breaking in, you give it _back_ , I won’t _have_ to.”

“You said yourself what you intended to do with it. I did what I did out of self-defense.”

Her silence was thick as smog with smoldering fury. Dell shook his head, rubbed sleep from his eyes. “Look. I don’t like to be this way, but what you got there—it’s dangerous, it’s a weapon. It’s—”

“It’s called Shark,” she interrupted, sounding exasperated. He stopped short, and to his surprise found he could read a dawning shock and a measure of horror on what little of her face he could see.

“ . . . Shark?”

“It. Nothing.”

He put his head a little to one side, incredulous. “Shark the flamethrower.”

She stood up, quick as a whip, and stormed out of the room. He did not see her again that day.

Time passed. The arsonist did not confront him a second time, and Dell’s life began to go back to normal. Today he was in the garage. Finally. Having a wild card like the arsonist around made him nervous about leaving his house unattended, which in turn meant his machines suffered. And this last damn project of his was fixing to make him blow a gasket anyway. He’d not got a chance to really sit down and get oil on his fingers in nearly a week, and frankly, going that long without brandishing a wrench at something disrupted his sleep.

Soft morning light filtered down through the garage’s high, reinforced windows. It sifted through dust motes and gilded whatever it touched. It stopped just short of lighting up most of the tarp-covered lumps stowed away in every nook and cranny, but reached over the scuffed cement floor to glance off shelves and assortments of tools and spare parts and seep into the cracks of whatever it could find.

One of the things it found was a stout little gunmetal gray machine in the middle of the building, propped up on four sturdy legs. On top of the legs sat a squat cylinder, with a rectangular barrel pointing in front of it. Its beeping, regular and quiet, filled the still air.

Dell studied it from where he leaned against one of the half-dozen workbenches lined up against the walls. Smudges of fresh grease already coated his work-clothes (overalls, tool belt, goggles and hardhat). Next to him on the bench was a whole collection of paper: blueprints pinned to the wood, drafts and pencils everywhere, and on top of these sat a mess of crumpled-up wads, in either red or blue.

The machine beeped, and Dell shook his head at it. “Now just you wait,” he told it, picking out one of the blue paper balls from the lot. With an easy underhand, he tossed it down in front of the machine. It beeped again, but nothing happened.

He nodded, and then pitched it a red one. The paper bounced off the ground and ricocheted off a crate, rolling to a stop just a foot in front of the machine. The machine beeped twice, but otherwise did nothing.

“Dagnabbit,” hissed Dell softly. He hefted a wrench out of his tool belt and crossed to where the machine stood in the sunlight, kneeling. “I’ll be darned if you ain’t given me more trouble than the other two, scamp,” he said to himself, quiet, checking the machine over as carefully as he might examine a horse.

When the crash came outside the window, he’d barely gotten the thing to the bench to dismantle it. He dropped the wrench, startled, and then cursed. Picking it up again, he stormed outside.

“Dog!” he roared, rounding the corner of the garage with the wrench brandished. “I done told you to git out of them damned barrels for the last—”

What greeted him was not the German Shepherd, having narrowly avoided death by falling junk once again. The dog had at some point gotten it in its head that something wonderful must be hidden in the scrap Dell kept on one side of the building—there was simply too much of it to keep in the garage. Instead he found a dark lump slumped awkwardly over an upturned barrel, half-covered by the splintered remains of a busted crate. Pieces of metal pooled around it like jacks, both rusted and new, sharp and dull.

He stared at this new witchery for what seemed like a long time before it moved ever so little, giving a long, muffled groan. The arsonist, he realized. He relaxed, and tucked the wrench away in a back pocket. “Now what in the heck do you think you’re doin’ . . . ” he sighed to himself, going forward.

Very slowly, she sat up. Stripped screws and broken wood slid off her to fall to the ground. She swayed, touching a hand to her unhooded (for once) head. Her fingers came away red, and she gazed at them stupidly. By the time Dell reached her and knelt by her side, the blood was running freely. “Don’t,” she said, the moment she noticed him.

“I won’t do nothin’ without askin’, firecracker,” he promised. “You remember where you are?”

“What?” she got out, thickly.

“You just knocked your head somethin’ fierce. Might be a concussion. Can I see it?”

Surprisingly, she let him. Gingerly he investigated the wet mess of greasy, matted hair with his gloved hand, still talking to her. “How you feelin’?”

“Hurts.”

“That’ll happen.”

The strap of her mask was getting in the way, already slick with red. Looking at where she’d fallen, he found more blood on the metal lip of the barrel she’d landed on. The cut itself seemed shallow, at least. He frowned. “Bleedin’ real bad, but head wounds’ll do that. Don’t look serious otherwise, just gone and knocked it good. I ain’t no doctor, though. Can you stand?” he asked, offering her his unbloodied hand.

“Don’t touch me,” the arsonist said. She tried to stand, reeled back a step, and fell right back down.

Dell said, “You’re bein’ plain stubborn, missy. You remember who I am?”

She groaned, covering her face. “Short bald jackass with a shotgun.”

A crooked grin drew itself across his mouth. “That’s right. Now I do believe you’re going to want a bandage for that. I can help you, but you got to have a little trust in me here.”

A withering silence fell over her. It grew worse and worse the longer she stubbornly ignored his hand. Finally he dropped it, and looked heavenward for a moment, thinking. Fine. He’d take the direct route.

He picked her up. She about blew out his eardrum with the squawk she made as he hefted her into a fireman’s carry, but that was more or less all the fight she had in her, thank God. Dell trucked her all the way back to his kitchen and deposited her as gently as he could into the table’s lone chair. She said something that manifested only as a series of _mmphs_ , and slouched forward onto the table.

Trundling off, he went in search of all the things he’d found wise to keep around, living a good hour’s drive from the nearest sawbones. Gauze, antiseptic, painkillers, cup of water. Needle and thread, though he didn’t think it’d probably come to that.

Tools in hand, he returned to find she had gotten her lighter out. For just a moment, he stood in the doorway, watching. On and off. On and off. She snapped it shut and rubbed her bloodied fingers against it, leaving dark smears on its brassy surface.

He stepped forward, and the floor creaked under him. She tensed and vanished the Zippo back into her oversized jacket, and in turn, he pretended not to have noticed. Setting the supplies on the table, he pulled his goggles up to his forehead and checked her wound again. “All right. Shouldn’t be a problem, but I’m gonna have to ask you to take that mask of yours off.”

Automatically, she raised her hand and flipped him off. He rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t be askin’ if it weren’t important. The strap’s in the way. That blood’s gonna get stuck under it an’ that won’t be pleasant for nobody, it’s gotta come off.”

“Then let me do it,” she growled. “I’m not stupid, I can take care of myself.” She reached out for the gauze as she said it, groping across the table. Instead, her hand smacked into the cup of water, knocking it over entirely. She stared at it mutely, then started off into another stream of muffled cursing. Staggering upright, she tried to seize the gauze from the table and succeeded this time, though she lost her footing and knocked the chair hard enough to topple it. She nearly followed suit. When Dell put out his hand to steady her she smacked it aside, storming off to the bathroom. She slammed the door behind her, and he heard the lock click.

So much for the rest of what he’d gotten out. After a few seconds he sighed, and went to fill up the spilled cup with more water and clean up the mess.

A few minutes later, the door unlocked, and she emerged. The bare minimum of gauze required was wrapped sloppily around her head, secure beneath the straps of the mask. She pitched the roll of cloth at him, and he caught it, easy. It found a home on the table, and he scooped up the painkillers. “Here, firebug,” he started, picking out two, “take these an’—”

Dell never saw it coming. His head snapped sideways when the arsonist hauled back and slugged him square in the jaw. He crashed into the table, pills clattering to the floor. Iron flooded his mouth, pain flooded his nerves. First shock and then a red burst of anger jolted through him.

“What in the _hell_ ,” he began, holding his jaw and staring at her. His voice ratcheted up in anger with every word. “What in the _blue hell_ do you think you’re damn well doing?!”

The arsonist was staring at her own fist, looking baffled. “I,” she began, falteringly. “I don’t know.” She dropped her hand, looking up at him. The sheer bewilderment in that lone eye was astonishing, and her voice was thick with confusion. “I don’t know.” Then she swallowed and added, “Sorry.”

She meant it, he realized. That was the oddest thing he’d seen her do yet. His brow knit, and for a long few seconds he studied her, carefully. Her gaze had dropped almost at once, back onto her hands. Dell wiped his mouth.

“Firebug,” he said again, low and testing. The arsonist tensed up in an instant. That was interesting. “Now how is it I can say ‘Smoky’ and ‘firecracker’ and all manner of thing, but ‘firebug’ gets you all het up?”

“ _Stop_ ,” she hissed, backing away from him. “I _don’t know,_ stop.”

Dell said nothing, still watching her. She was wound up now, all right, more than ready for a fight. She had a mean right hook, too, much more powerful than he’d expected. That was going to bruise. “I won’t,” he said at last. “I won’t. Just curious.”

When she seemed sure he really meant it, her shoulders loosened, and she knelt to pick up the pills he’d dropped. Turning her back to him, she undid the bottom straps of the mask and tilted it up. She threw back her head and swallowed them dry, and then the mask was put back in place.

She slunk back to the couch, ignoring him, and flung herself down on it. Dell rubbed his smarting jaw again and shook his head. _I don’t know._ What was he supposed to make of that?

But he got her set up with some food and water, a random stack of books pulled from a shelf, and, after some thought, found the dog and lured it into the room. The pair of them seemed to get along, at least. When he left her, she was silent and still, lying on her side and facing the cushions.

Only when he was safely back at the garage did he allow himself to sink down onto a crate, looking up at the window the crash had come from and massaging his jaw. He’d try and find out what she had been doing later, he supposed, when he was less sore and she was less concussed. He could guess, really. But he had work to do; the gray machine was waiting to be dismantled. Yet he sat for a while anyway, trying to imagine what was under that mask—why that one word had pulled her trigger.

“Asleep on the job, monsieur?” asked a thickly-accented voice, interrupting his thoughts a few minutes later, and Dell nearly fell off the crate.


	9. Masks

A soft chuckle lingered in the dusty sunbeams as Dell picked himself up, cussing under his breath. “Get where I can see ya,” he snapped at the thin air, and in turn the thin air became flesh. It rippled and sighed, and then melted into a crisp navy suit with matching tie. Wearing the suit was a man narrow as a razor and just as sharp on the edges. He held himself with enviable dignity and care. His profile was hawk-like, and like a hawk he was hooded: a dark blue balaclava covered his face, leaving only his mouth and sharp blue eyes exposed. His arms were folded casually across his chest, a fine cigarette hanging from the fingers of his right hand, and he stood with his back to Dell, inspecting the blueprints that hung from the walls above the workbenches.

Dell brushed off his pants, his face dark as thunder. “I damn well asked y’all to quit that _Invisible Man_ hogwash ‘round here.”

The man half-turned, offering him a knowing smile. “That may be so, but I made no promises.” He turned back to inspect the gray machine on the paper-strewn bench now, and tapped it with the back of a gloved knuckle experimentally. When it did nothing, he lost interest. “Keeping busy, I trust?” he said, slipping out a sleek tin box from within his suit. He opened it in a practiced motion, revealing the cigarettes within, and offered it to Dell, who sighed and took one.

“Can’t complain,” Dell answered, sticking it behind his ear like a pencil. He ignored the way the man wrinkled his nose at the action. “S’pose you’re off heistin’ papers?”

“You could say that,” the man said, snapping the case shut and returning it to his pocket. “But you know why I am here, of course.” His words were laced with some impenetrable mixture of European influences, elegant and reserved.

“’Course I know. Same thing every time, isn’t it? Clear off that.” Dell motioned him off with the wrench, hovering over the machine perhaps a little too protectively. “Sure don’t need you jinxing it . . . Tell ’im, what’s his name, Blutarch, tell Blutarch I’m almost finished.”

The man leaned back against the bench, watching Dell as he fretted over the machine like a mother hen. “You do realize you are on a deadline, don’t you, Conagher?”

“The blueprints ain’t exactly straightforward even with the cipher, and that’s not countin’ the improvements an’ stabilizations,” said Dell, brushing cigarette ash from the workbench. “Can’t rush these things.”

“Our esteemed employer thinks otherwise.” The man put his cigarette to his lips and drew from it as Dell crouched down beneath the bench. “The last time I came your implication was that it would only be another month.”

Finding what he was looking for, Dell came back up holding a heavy metal toolbox, and set it down on the bench with a bang. A screw fell from the machine’s guts to the wood and draft paper, landing with an echoing clatter. “And that was before we were both shuffled off to another three-week excursion in New Mexico,” he said, pinning down the screw with his thumb before it could roll away. “Bit hard to work on it when I’m fightin’ for my life.”

“And yet you are working on this . . . toy?”

Dell’s expression soured. “It’s a _gun,_ Mr. Bond, and it will be covering your sorry transparent hide here in a few weeks. Don’t tell me how to do my job. Y’all don’t see me tellin’ you how to go around stalkin’ people, do ya?” He shook his head, fitting the screw back into place in a delicate motion. “The machine, it’ll get done. It’s almost done as it is, just needs some fine-tunin’.” His words were lined with exasperation, and he had to stop a moment to get his patience back. Damned if this man didn’t always wind him up. Crookeder than a dog’s hind leg. “Wouldn’t want to send ‘our esteemed employer’ a faulty immortality machine, now would I?”

The man rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “It is on your head, either way. I am just a messenger.”

“I’d say you’re a bit more than that,” Dell answered, dropping his eyes his guest’s right sleeve before pulling his safety goggles down over them.

Following his gaze, the man smirked. “I suppose you could.”

Dell went back to work. The man watched him for a time as he dismantled the gun into a collection of parts, eyes half-lidded in boredom. After a few minutes of this, when his cigarette had burned down to the filter, he said, “How is your, ah, friend, then? Unharmed, I hope?”

Dell paused in mid-twist of his wrench. “Jus’ how long you been sneakin’ around?”

“Long enough,” the man smiled. He paused, dropping the cigarette and grinding it out with the heel of one patent-leather shoe. “He—she?—was spying on you.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Who are they?”

“I reckon that’s none of your business.”

“On the contrary,” said the man. “I think you will find that there is very little which is _not_ my business.”

Dell grunted in answer, and returned his attention to his work. The gun lay in pieces on the bench, now; Dell had done this so many times by now it was second nature. He cast over the parts, searching—ah. There was the bit he needed: the radar looked knocked out of joint.

His uninvited company took to wandering around the garage, lifting tarps and poking his aquiline nose into dusty corners. Dell ignored him. He’d yet to muck anything up, and there wasn’t anything he could snoop his way into. The radar needed his full attention, anyway.

All was quiet for a time until something tucked away into a corner gave a sharp warning beep as the man in blue passed it. He stopped in his tracks, instantly tense. When nothing happened, he relaxed. A contemplative _hmm_ reached Dell’s ears, and the man turned and glanced over his shoulder at him. “You keep the sentry built? Even here?”

Dell turned the wrench on the replaced gauge in the radar. “Seemed like a good idea. I got you creepin’ around after all, the other one might try showin’ up one day too. Feels better havin’ it around anyway.”

The man made an unimpressed noise. “The sappers still work outside of Teufort.”

“Caught _you_ off guard,” Dell said, turning. He leaned back on the bench and tipped his goggles and hardhat up to better admire his creation: the four-foot-tall, black-and-blue contraption resting on its tripod, visible over the man’s shoulder. Both its sleek barrels were trained on the man in blue, but it soon ceased to pay him any attention, going at ease. Dell had disabled its sweeping behavior after it had knocked the shelves around it off the walls for the third time. “I’d say that’s pretty good proof on its own.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” the man said, brushing off his suit. “Only a second-level model?”

“Wouldn’t let me take the rocket launchers home.”

“Ah. Of course. Tell me, friend, would you describe yourself as ‘paranoid’ at all?”

“Just enough,” Dell said, smiling to himself as he turned back to his work.

 

* * *

 

The door eased open, and the arsonist didn’t hear it.

Her head hurt. More than usual, at least. Dizzy, which was new. But she’d gotten up on shaky legs after the immediate nausea had gone away anyway, just to give the metaphorical finger to Conagher, and managed to raid his bookshelf: everything he’d left for her was trash, nonfiction, or technical manuals for devices she wasn’t interested in. She would have preferred to go right back out there and try figuring out where Shark was, but the pounding, angry pain in her skull had forbidden it.

So now she was back on the couch, mask firmly in place and buried in something promising-looking she’d found on the shelf. It was new, just out that year, with a shiny cover and the name _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_

It was an odd book, so far, but enjoyable, and more importantly not too long. Reading anything for more than a few minutes now gave her a migraine. Not that she had much reading material these days, anyway. Newspapers and garbage labels, mostly. It surprised her that she remembered how to read, really. She’d forgotten so much.

She was two chapters in and just about to join Rick Deckard on his way to his job when the dog, which had planted itself in the middle of the carpet to give her soulful looks and lick itself, stood. If that was all it had done, she wouldn’t have noticed. But it got up in a stiff-legged way, its head low and its pointed satellite ears up, toward the doorway. The arsonist froze, her eyes darting up to the gap in the wall that led from living room to kitchen, where the front door was. From here, she couldn’t see more than the edge of the table, and a few cupboards, and half of a window. The door was out of her line of sight.

The dog growled, and she heard the door shut gently. Quiet footsteps followed, and then stopped. A few seconds passed, and the dog relaxed. It padded forward, cautious still, and she put down the book. The animal paused in the doorway, tail wagging now. She could see a human knee sticking out from behind the wall, by the dog’s head, and a gloved hand reached out to scratch a furry ear. Neither belonged to Dell Conagher.

She found herself casting about for a weapon, anything hard and sturdy. Nothing was in easy reach, and her host had hidden away the little cast-iron statue she’d attacked him with the other week. (She couldn’t really remember why she’d done that, only that she had—and it had been important, but she wasn’t sure why.) Before she could do anything else, though, the man who was not Dell Conagher stood up and stepped into the room.

He was lean and wiry, dressed to kill. He wore something over his face that showed only his eyes and mouth, and for a brief moment she understood the apprehension a mask brought with it, the apprehension she brought with her wherever she went. The dog had gone back to its place on the carpet, and the man looked down at it with a wry smile. He held a unlit cigarette in one hand. “I have often found it is well worth befriending dogs, if at all possible. What do you think?”

It took her a few seconds to find her tongue. “Who the fuck are you?”

The masked man made his way over to Conagher’s big armchair, sitting down lightly. He crossed one leg over the other, relaxing. “No one you need to be concerned with,” he said easily. “I am but one of Mr. Conagher’s . . . coworkers.” Coworkers. The arsonist glared at him. What the hell kind of job did Conagher do to work with someone like this? He had the kind of accent she had only ever heard on television. “Who might you be?”

“Nobody.”

He tilted his head, smirking. “Turnabout is fair play,” he conceded. He fished out a lighter from his pocket (she came to attention immediately. Foreign model, Zippo-sized, brushed metal), and cupped his hand around the flame as he put it to the cigarette. Glancing up, he asked, “How rude of me—may I offer you one?” As he said it, he reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a plain gray cigarette case, opening it smoothly with one hand. He held it out as far as his arm could go, like he worried about getting too close to her. Inside lay six sleek rolls of paper and tobacco beneath a thin metal band.

The nicotine craving slammed into her like a brick, making her head pound and her bones itch. When was the last time she’d had a smoke? There was certainly nothing to smoke around here, she’d checked everything Conagher didn’t have nailed down, and some of the things he did.

When, then? She knew she’d had one just before she got into town, before she’d run into Conagher and his shotgun. Or she . . . she almost knew. Had she accepted one off of the freckled-drunk-redheaded Irishman on the Greyhound? Or the box of Lucky Strikes, had that been what the teenager with the blotchy face pressed into her hands as she sat in a hungry daze outside the run-down drug store?

But then, the Lucky Strikes had vanished shortly after that. No box, she couldn’t even remember smoking them. Maybe she had imagined them. Those people, had they even been real? She’d found herself talking to air before, convinced that a moment ago someone was speaking to her.

Pushing it out of her mind in a flash of anger, she reached out to snatch three of the proffered straights from the case. They were solid and real beneath her gloved fingers, and she thought nothing of the man’s raised eyebrows at her greed. He had offered. Clearly he could afford it. Letting her hands linger a moment over their smooth surfaces, she stowed them in her jacket. Her fingers shook, she wanted them so badly, but—no. Later. Couldn’t very well enjoy them now. Later.

Apparently, he decided not to say anything, snapping the case shut and returning it to his breast pocket. “I could not help but notice your ill-fated attempt at espionage,” he said. She went stiff, staring at the ground. The dog was watching her. “May I ask why?”

“No.”

“Ah,” he said. “I will ask it anyway. Why?”

“ . . . Took something of mine.” Her own voice startled her. She hadn’t meant to tell him. Why did she do that?

His brow lifted in curiosity. “Hm. I knew Mr. Conagher to be many things, but a thief is not one of them. What did he take from you?”

The arsonist swallowed. “Something important.” Important. Vital, even. Shark was all she had. (Shark the flamethrower. Even she knew that was crazy.)

“How unkind.” But that was all he said, and she didn’t say anything back.

At some point he had leaned forward, elbows on knees. He was studying her now, more intense than before, and when that occurred to her she felt her heart rate skyrocket. Why was he doing that. Why was he, he, he needed to stop, he needed to stop _now_. But he didn’t, and they simply sat there in silence: him with his cigarette and her with her skeleton suddenly so rigid as to be fused into one piece. He wouldn’t _leave_. Why wouldn’t he leave? At least Conagher left her alone. A momentary surge of appreciation for the old man breathed through her. It vanished as quickly as it came.

“Funny company he keeps, isn’t it?” the man said at last. “Masked, the pair of us.”

No. No more. She was leaving. The arsonist stood up, and stopped short when the blood rushed to her still-aching head. The man said something as she put both hands to her pounding temples, but she couldn’t make it out.

To her displeasure she found that going anywhere was out of the question. Sitting had left her feeling steadier than she really was. She leaned against the arm of the couch, arms folded, willing her head to stop spinning. The whole time the man only eyed her curiously. “Where’s Conagher?” she managed, a few seconds later.

The man neatly steepled his knife-edge hands. “Working, I believe.”

“Garage?”

“Naturally.”

“What’re you doing in here, then?”

The man in blue chuckled and took the cigarette from his mouth, grinding it out casually in a plate left on the side table. “I have already spoken with him, and as I could discern you were likely ‘laid up’ after your fall, I thought I would come and . . . introduce myself.” He gave her a conspiratorial sort of look. “Mr. Conagher isn’t terribly sociable, I am sure you have noticed. The fact he has a guest at all is something of an event.”

It made her skin crawl to admit, even to herself, that he was right. No one had come calling on Conagher in the last two weeks. Not that she knew anything about house guests, but. Ugh. This was horseshit.

“Why do you wear that thing?” the man asked suddenly, those sharp eyes on her again. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. “The _filtre_ , the mask. Broken. Looks uncomfortable. Unless it is a fashion statement . . . ?”

“Piss off,” she said, her voice a gunshot, making the dog’s ears whip upright. Twice in one day about the mask, fuck. Why did they always want to know? The mask was a mask was a mask, she wasn’t hiding anything.

Never mind the fact that’s what a mask was for, hiding.

The man held up both hands in a show of peace. “Merely an inquiry. Kindly don’t fall, won’t you?” he said, eying her shaky knees. “I would almost feel obliged to help you up, and you might be carrying something.”

“I have double tuberculosis and half-a-dozen strains of rabies,” she sneered automatically, sinking back onto the couch. “Bite me.”

“I’ll have to decline.” he chuckled. When he stood up, she flinched. He made no notice, or pretended not to. “Well, Nobody,” he said, brushing off his suit, “ _Enchanté_. I shall take my leave of you. Best of luck with the rabies, and in your future spying endeavors—though, on second thought, that is perhaps best left to us professionals.”

He flashed her a smirk as sharp and sleek as he was, a smirk that drove her up a wall just looking at it. He adjusted his tie, gave her a nod, and—

Vanished.

He melted out of sight, turned to nothing, disappeared in a shimmer of blue light, and the arsonist, still dizzy and weak, could only stare at where he had stood.

She forced herself to her feet again, tripped over the dog, and landed halfway on her knees onto Dell’s chair. The smell of smoke hung in the air. The cigarette the man had finished still lay on the plate, and the ones she had taken from him were still in her pocket when she scrambled to find them. If they were there, and they were, they _were_ , she hadn’t imagined the whole thing. She couldn’t have.

But people, real people, didn’t just disappear into thin air.

Hallucinations, on the other hand, did.

Her brain felt full of static. Slowly, she picked herself back up and returned to the couch, one of the cigarettes clenched tightly in her fist. The nicotine craving was howling at her, she needed that cigarette, but it was all the evidence she had. Cigarettes didn’t come out of nowhere, Dell didn’t smoke, he’d told her so himself. The man in the blue suit was the only one she could have gotten them from.

And an hour or so later, Dell came back with a cigarette of the same brand as the ones in her pocket between his lips.


	10. Dementia

Do crazy people, the arsonist wondered, realize they’re crazy?

She didn’t know. She hadn’t thought she was that far gone, not yet. But no matter how many times she replayed her memories of the man in the blue suit, they all ended in him disappearing. Like a hologram, or something out of science fiction. She was left with three cigarettes and a growing sense of panic.

The cigarettes, the cigarettes were real. The paper was smooth against her fingers, the little indents her nails left in the cylinders were visible and stayed put. And she’d gotten them from the masked man, ergo, he must have existed. But Dell had one, too—and she’d hit her head just hours ago . . . and real people didn’t wander around in the middle of spring dressed in suits and ski masks. They didn’t show up unannounced in the empty Texas countryside with eloquent European accents. They didn’t vanish into thin air.

But she still had three cigarettes, and when she demanded to know where Dell had gotten his he just shrugged and said, “Guess I had some ‘round here after all.” The bruise she had given him earlier was flowering into a broad splash of purple and green. She thought about slugging him again, on purpose this time. But she just stared at him, turned on her heel, and stalked back to the couch.

She thought about it, thought in circles for God knew how long. Nothing made sense.

And then, she was outside.

She didn’t notice it until some wild bird screeched loudly into the night, jarring her from her thoughts. Thrown from her slowly mounting panic, she blinked owlishly into the cool air.

It was dark. The lights in the house were out, and she had the Zippo in her hands, still stained with her blood from a few hours ago. The door stood open behind her, and she could feel the warped wood of the patio beneath her and the cool air against her face.

This last startled her. Her mask had somehow gotten pushed up to rest on her forehead. She reached up to yank it back down, and her hand bumped against something smooth and papery. When she cursed in surprise, the remains of the cigarette that had managed to find its way to her mouth fell to the ground.

She didn’t remember doing that. She didn’t even remember getting up from the couch and walking out the door. Shit. She was burning through her precious little evidence of sanity without even realizing it. The thought chased away any soothing effect the tobacco might have had.

Stamping out the cigarette with more force than strictly necessary, she pulled the mask back over her face and stumbled forward to sit in the chilly grass. Her nerves screeched for more nicotine.

She was losing time again. How reassuring.

It had been happening more frequently. At least, she thought it was. Maybe not. Who could say? But the gaps in her memory felt like they were widening. She didn’t know how she’d come to the conclusion that clambering up the rickety barrels and bins outside the garage earlier would be a great idea, for example. That was why she’d fallen, she’d rubber-banded back to reality while on top of the damn things. It had startled her so much she’d lost her footing. Now she had a concussion! Head trauma could only help in this situation.

She’d lost time between burning down the hockey stadium and arriving at Conagher’s, too. The last thing she remembered was staring up at the holy beauty of a monstrous building aflame, bright against the dark night sky. She’d listened to the snap of falling supports and the crackling explosions, and the shrieks of gas that sounded almost human. Almost. Not quite. Couldn’t have been. Then sirens in the distance drowned it out anyway, and she couldn’t tell anymore.

And all at once she’d been moving raggedly through vast fields of white and brown at sunset, nauseous with hunger, dizzy with thirst and exhaustion. She had to burn something. She had to get away.

Her own mind was playing with her. Staying at Conagher’s had dulled it, just a little. Regular food and a safe place to sleep would do that, probably. Then he’d gone and ruined it by saying that word, that _one_ word that made her nerves seize up and her gut clench.

_Firebug_.

A wave of nausea flooded through her at the memory.

She curled into a ball, pressing her masked face to her knees. For a while she stayed that way, flickering in and out of awareness, willing the feeling to go.

When she came to again, the dying ember of a used-up cigarette lay in the grass between her feet.

For a long time, she just stared at it. It took her a whole ten seconds to remember, and then she cursed again, and loudly. She scrambled for her pocket, for the smokes from the masked man, and found just one left. One, only one, hadn’t she had three?—and then she remembered, no. She’d used up the first just a few minutes ago.

Damn it. Damn all of it! She didn’t even get to remember enjoying the damn things! With an angry noise she snuffed out the glowing paper and shoved it back into her pocket.

And now she was sore from how she’d been sitting. Lovely.

Back inside, then. Maybe she’d be able to make herself ask Conagher about the man in the morning, but she wasn’t hopeful. It was all spiraling downward anyway.

She stood, and turned, just in time to see a light come on in Conagher’s garage.

It was a fuzzy, soft light, easily visible in the empty countryside but still dim. Beneath the mask, her brow furrowed, and her gaze cut to the second story of Conagher’s home. What time was it?—wasn’t he usually in bed by now?

She looked back to the garage just as another light went on, and then went off again. Before she really realized what she was doing, she was moving toward it.

Nights in the countryside were something else. She’d grown accustomed to the soft rumbling song of city nights, the occasional buzz of a car or raccoons rummaging in dumpsters nearby. Snatches of late-night conversations caught through windows, drunken young men ambling by, sometimes. There was nothing like that here. Not to say it was quiet, God, no. It was the animals, the birds. The insects. She’d never be able to identify any of them, but there were constant churring rattles, hooting things. Sometimes an unholy, bestial cackle would pull her from her baseless nightmares ( _rainbow explosions, floods of black and red, an infernal orchestra playing on and on and on)_ , and she would be glad of the interruption.

The sounds were no different now, as she picked her way to the garage. Crickets (she assumed they were crickets) chirruped endlessly at her feet. Some kind of bird was calling over and over in the distance. Once she thought she saw yellow eyes watching her from a long way off, but they vanished as soon she noticed them.

The garage’s door was still shut fast, locked. When she listened, she heard nothing from within, but the light stayed on. Perhaps there was another way in. Making her way around to the back of the building, she found she was right: a gray little door stood open, just a hair. Soft light trickled through it, casting a yellow haze on the grass. Within, she saw nothing. Suspicious, she hung in the doorway a moment: maybe it was a trick. A trap.

Because that made sense.

She shook herself, frustrated with her relentless paranoia. It did nothing but send a shudder of dread through her bones. To spite it anyway, she stepped inside.

It was a monstrous place. Support beams sprouted up from the ground like tree trunks. All around her she found machinery, tools, hardware. Shovels and rakes leaned haphazardly in corners. A half-dismantled something sat on one of the many workbenches lining the walls. Blueprints were pinned to almost every free vertical space, and what was not taken up by blueprints was taken up by tools and cramped rows of shelving. Everything imaginable lined the latter: scrap metal, wiring, soldering kits, lighter fluid, balled-up pieces of paper. Wrinkled white tarps as textured as snake-skin were slung over dozens of mysterious objects, some taller than she was. The outfit as a whole could be best described an organized mess.

It was nothing like her—

Like her—

She paused mid-step, staring at nothing. The thought had come to her quite unbidden, and now that she had noticed it she could not complete it for the life of her.

She waited. But it never finished itself. It just lay there in her mind, still and dead and unmoving, like a bird that hit a window. Nothing more came of it.

With a nasty hiss, she pushed the thought away, and slunk further in.

The place was a maze of standing shelves and sawhorses, all sunk into shadow. If someone was in here, they could be anywhere. Any _thing_ could be in here.

Shark was in here, she remembered with a sharp inhalation. If she could get Shark she could leave, or at least she’d have it back, anyway. It would be worth the concussion.

Quite soon she found herself in the middle of it all, peering around cautiously. There was no one, nothing she could see or hear. No sign of her flamethrower. There was just the hum of the lights above and the endless calls of the countryside.

Wait.

There.

Footsteps.

She jerked to look behind her, and found nothing. She turned back and startled so badly she nearly fell over. Hands in his pockets, head a bit to one side as he leaned against a shelf a few feet away, someone was watching her. “Conagher,” she blurted, more relieved than she had any right to be.

It was him, all right. He had his goggles and a hardhat on, and an outfit she’d never seen: brown overalls, kneepads, a light blue work shirt with rolled-up sleeves. A yellow circle with a blue wrench within was embroidered on the shoulder. It took him a moment to respond. “Naturally,” he said at last. “Now jus’ what are you doin’ in here?”

Oh, hell. The arsonist glanced off to one side. “Door was open.”

“Mighty late,” he observed. She looked up at him again. “Look, why don’t you get on back to bed?”

Something felt off. He’d been too damn adamant about her _not_ getting in here earlier, and now  . . . she squinted at him for a few seconds in the dim lighting. “. . . Where’s my flamethrower?”

“Your—?” He gave her a strange look before he trailed off. God, something was out of place but she couldn’t find it. The darkness wasn’t helping her, the screaming anxiety in the back of her head was driving her insane. She slipped a hand into her pocket and found the comforting surface of the Zippo. “It’s fine, a’course. Here now, it’s late. I’ll . . . ”

That was all she heard before it registered, though he kept talking. Conagher’s shadowed jawline was evenly-colored, all one shade of dull beige and five o’clock shadow. There was no sign of the massive purple bruise she’d laid into him earlier, and that, _that_  . . .

Her knuckles were still sore. She hadn’t imagined that. _Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong._

It wasn’t until Conagher cut himself off, bristling, that she realized she’d begun advancing. He’d held up a hand as if to stop her. “Whoa now, what d’you think y—”

She slugged him. Again.

With a terrific clatter he jerked backward, colliding with the shelves he leaned against. A dozen tools and parts clattered to the ground, and he lost his legs. She stood over him, her breathing suddenly heavy, waiting—waiting for what?—

His whole body wavered, like some great heat separated them. She went stock-still, staring as Conagher stopped being Conagher. His image rippled and changed and then he was not Conagher at all. He had become the masked man, his eyes screwed shut and his teeth clenched in pain.

Every ounce of rationale she had managed until now was drowned out by instinct. She threw herself at him with a wild snarl, driving him to the ground. They landed on the cement with an awful crack, and the man cried out in pain. _Good_.

Whatever shell of a human she’d been was gone. Now there was nothing but mad-dog rending and tearing, clawing at anything she could reach, going for the face and throat, pulling out every dirty trick she had ever learned. She felt his suit rip, his collarbone bruise, all this until he finally got his legs up beneath her and drove both knees squarely into her gut. With a winded grunt, she felt herself go limp.

Then something slammed hard into her side; she felt a sharp, cold pain that grew dull quickly. Startled, she froze. The man’s clenched fist was pressed against her abdomen, and she choked down a hideous cry when he pulled whatever he held out and away. Then he slammed it between her ribs, and she couldn’t stop the wail of agony that followed.

Without further preamble, he kicked her off. Too shocked to do anything else, she fell back onto her knees, clutching her side. Her hands were rapidly growing wet.

“That was extraordinarily unwise,” the man said in a gravelly voice. He’d gotten up, she realized, and something long and sharp and dripping hung from his fingertips. “Though I suppose I must commend your instincts.”

His words barely registered. Something hissed its way out of her mouth, but she didn’t even know what she’d said. The man was dusting off his suit. He tugged at a few dark spots on the end of his jacket, scowling. “You simply had to bleed on me, didn’t you?” As he spoke, she trying to struggle to her feet, desperately wishing for her flamethrower. The man snorted, and stepped on her shoulder, forcing her to the ground. “No, please! Don’t get up. I suppose I’ll show myself out, now you’ve gone and made things hard for me.” He paused. “I don’t suppose you know where the blueprints might be, do you? No? Ah, well. Do enjoy your last few minutes of life, then.”

Her rage was being drowned in mute, empty noise, the sound of a dead phone line, the hum of a television channel after broadcast hours. Her mouth tasted like iron. Her vision faded, and for how long she couldn’t tell. When it came back, the man was gone.

But somehow she’d gotten to her feet. Her legs were shaking violently, but she’d managed to grab onto a nearby workbench for support. Everything hurt. She couldn’t think properly.

The back door still stood open, though it seemed a lot further away than she remembered. She could walk that far, to the outside, surely. Maybe even to the house. She couldn’t just stay here, bleeding.

Her heart seemed to be beating awfully fast.

The arsonist took a step, and felt all the blood rush from her head. She nearly fell. Okay. Okay, no. Probably not to the house, then.

There was a pole in front of her, one of the support beams keeping the roof stable, standing just a few yards away. More lead past it, a series of them toward the garage’s front door. She could make it that far. Of course she could. She took another step and could not stop the pained gasp that forced its way past her lips.

Her temper flared brilliantly, egged on by her own mortality. Bright flashes of agony were lighting up her nerves with every motion, but by God, she would not be bound by the confines of anything so mundane as her body.

Just to the pole.

It took far too long, forcing one lead-weighted foot in front of the other. When eventually she got to it and let herself rest, her head was spinning, and something like tears were fogging one eye. The next pole looked like it was a million miles away.

Standing there, she let her gaze flicker about the cavernous space as she tried to catch her breath. Everything looked dark around the edges. More shelves, more hardware. Little lights, miniature radar dishes, a gas pump handle sticking out from under a tarp, parts, parts, and more parts—

Oh. Oh God. She jerked her eyes back up to the handle, staring. It was an ancient-looking thing, scuffed and ugly, once painted and now faded to a muddy not-color. Her flamethrower.

Any other thought fled from her, drowned out by a need, an overwhelming need to get it back, protect it, fix it. Without thinking she pushed away from the pole, all pain forgotten, and staggered toward where it sat atop a shelf a few yards away.

She was halfway there when something to her left went **BEEP**. It was so loud and so jarring it yanked her from her fixation. She stopped mid-limp to stare between two deep rows of free-standing shelves, into the darkness.

Something tall and mechanical stared back at her. **BEEP** , it said again, and it twisted to line her up between its pair of black barrels.

There were twin muzzle flashes and a terrific series of bangs. In the same instant she was on the ground a few feet away.

She lay there almost thirty seconds, limp and stunned, before the pain came back. Oh, did it come back. It brought friends this time. It cut through her like a blunt saw, turned every breath into a fight, she couldn’t move. All she could do was stare at the ground directly in front of her. A spray of blood painted the cement where she’d been a moment ago.

There was blood in her mouth. There was more every passing second. What if she drowned in it, in her own blood? What if it pooled up in the mask and choked her? She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe.

The thing in the darkness issued another, quieter _beep_. Then there was no noise at all.

_You go bustin’ in there, Conagher said, you’re in for a world of trouble._

The arsonist’s vision faded to white, and then to nothing.


	11. Phantom

 

A sound buzzed through his teeth and bones, startling Dell awake. With a hoarse cry he sat bolt upright, groping for a weapon on pure instinct.

It was still dark. No morning birds sang yet, and only the constant hum of crickets pierced the silence. He pulled himself out of bed on automatic, joints working from muscle memory alone. He was clear into his overalls, shotgun in hand, before he even really woke up. It wasn’t until he was halfway down the stairs that he realized what the noise was: his sentry’s target alert, a little PDA blinking blue with alarm on his nightstand. Someone was in the garage.

When he stormed downstairs he found the dog alone on the couch, its head tilted sideways and its ears high. “Well, c’mon then,” he told it sharply, and in reply the dog woofed and darted ahead. It beat him outside, through the open door he knew he’d shut and locked before bed. It started sniffing circles through the dew-wet grass, and leapt aside as he thundered past it.

All he had to do was round the side of the house to see the lights bleeding through the garage windows into the evening. That cinched it. Dell grit his teeth and ran.

The front door was tight shut, but the back gaped open like a wound. The dog barreled in and he followed, the butt of his shotgun to his shoulder. But he found no danger, no sign of the enemy he expected. Instead there was blood on the ground, a little track of it leading from a fat splatter at the foot of a tipped-over shelf. The trail went to one of the poles, painted it red at about hip-height, and staggered left again to disappear behind an aisle of shelving. He cussed, and followed it.

The door had not been forced open. He’d scarcely noticed the empty state of the couch when he left, and the arsonist’s absence was last on his mind. So when he found her in a bloody heap on the ground, unmoving, he nearly dropped the gun in surprise.

Didn’t take him more than a second or two to get his bearings, though. The wild spray of blood a few feet from her, the spent bullet shells scattered at random across the concrete, the familiar beep of alert when he moved within the sentry’s range of fire—they all spoke volumes.

The dog was upon the rag-doll body in an instant, and so was Dell. Gun put aside, he knelt down in the congealing puddle and (carefully, carefully) rolled her over. “You’d best not be dead,” he told her in a tight, rough voice, searching for signs of life. “I can’t do nothing for ya if you’re dead . . . ”

She had a pulse, though it took him far too long to find it. Her breathing was ragged and uneven, bullet holes riddled her chest. She was slipping away. “Alright. Alright . . . ”

First things first. Standing, he left her with the dog and went to the sentry. It beeped at him, almost cheerful, and he shook his head at it as he popped open a hatch on its side. A few switches flipped and dials twisted later, its beeping ceased and its wide barrels drooped downward. This done, he turned his attention to the stout, rectangular shape hidden under a tarp just a few feet away.

The few seconds or so it took him to rip off the tarp and haul the weighty box next to the arsonist and set it up felt like a thousand years. He’d swear that pool of blood crept inches further across the floor every time he looked back at it. But at last he let it thump to the ground, slammed the power button, and hastily tapped a series of keys.

The box—light blue, loaded down with munitions, gauges and countless other strange parts—started to hum, low and deep. Very quickly it was alight with a soft blue glow, and the glow reached out to the arsonist and enveloped her.

Dell eased down onto an overturned bucket a short ways away, brows knit. “Hope this works,” he said to the body on the floor, trepidation in his voice. “Dunno why it wouldn’t. Exceptin’ this’n’s a prototype. Never did get it out on the field . . . well. Guess we’ll see, huh?”

The dog had trotted back over to him, watching him attentively. It wagged its tail and set its chin on his knee. With a sigh, he reached out and ruffled its ears. Then he settled back, rubbed his eyes, and said a little prayer on the off-chance someone was listening.

All he could do now was wait.

 

* * *

 

Darkness still tinted the garage’s high windows. Dell had long since drifted off into a kind of tired daze, letting the hypnotic sounds of the machine lull him to sleep. When the arsonist moved, hours later, he missed it.

She shifted, a thick groan issuing from the mask. Slowly, she tried to sit up, failed spectacularly, and dropped back down to the ground. The grunt of pain and resultant smack of flesh on cement startled Dell from his trance. He blinked awake, and found her pushing herself up again. After a second—a third try, she managed to slouch forward into her own lap, puppet-like.

He could see her blinking through the gas mask. She didn’t seem to see him. She didn’t seem to see anything, actually, she was staring moon-eyed all over the garage. It was eerie to watch. Everything from her chest down was an ugly mess. Holes shredded her damp clothes, and she lay in a crusting brown puddle of her own blood. A muddled noise escaped her.

“You’re alive,” Dell breathed in relief. The arsonist flinched magnificently, jerking backwards so hard she hit the machine with her head. Wincing, she hunched up into herself.

“What,” she croaked, voice uneven and muddy. She only looked up when he spoke again.

“Just me,” he said, raising his hands peaceably. “How you fee—”

A high, alien noise cut him off, and it took him a little too long to realize it had come from her, had been some grotesque approximation of a woman’s cry. It was so sharp and loud it sent the dog, which had previously been napping at Dell’s side, running for cover.

She was staring at him like she’d seen a ghost, shoving herself backwards with both feet as hard as she could given the circumstances, which was not very hard. “No,” she was saying. “No, no no _no_ , you’re not . . . _how?_ You’re, you’re  . . . ” Her back hit the knobs and drawers of the machine, and still then she was pushing away so desperately he thought she would knock it over. “Go away. Go away!”

Dell leaned backwards, hands on his knees as he watched her beginning to mount a full-scale panic attack. She was cringing _,_ she looked small and pathetic. It took him a moment to find his tongue. “Hold up. What’re you on about?”

“You’re, you’re s’posed t’be dead,” she said fitfully, words slurring together. “Oh my God. It was an accident. I swear it was an accident, you were my—you were my _friend,_ you were the only friend I had, I _wouldn’t_ have  . . . ”

Her wide and staring eye was hugely dilated, pupil blown out far wider than anything he had ever seen. “An accident?” Dell said, quietly.

“ _Please_ ,” she begged.

He chewed his lip. When he stood up, she pulled away from him, trying to protect herself with her arms. He turned off the blue box, and the twining lights vanished. For a couple seconds he just stood there, weighing his options—battling his own curiosity. The curiosity won. “What happened?”

She couldn’t speak properly for a few seconds, gaping. Then a piercing, broken kind of sound split the air before dragging off into words. “I, the. Th-the explosion. It was—it was me. The rockets, I . . . I fired one low . . . and one hit the shed and you were in there and it—i-it—” She stopped short, deathly quiet but for her panicked breathing. “It wasn’t on purpose,” she said, a few seconds later. “I know how fucked up I was about the thing on, with, with the bus, but it wasn’t on purpose, I swear.”

“‘Course not,” Dell said—was all he could think to say—but she didn’t seem to hear.

“And then I—I ran away. I ran away.” The little of her face he could see contorted with horror. “Oh, my God, I ran away. I killed you and then I ran away and then I—don’t know what happened. This happened,” she said, one hand touching the gas mask. Then she dug her fingernails into her palm and sunk deep, deep into herself, covering her face with her hands. “I’m, _ohhh_ , f-fuck. I’m—I’m _sorry_ , Tobias. I’m _so sorry_.”

That was the light bulb, the realization of _oh hell, she’s hallucinating_. Dell shot a worried glance at the prototype dispenser. “It’s—” Damn it, he was no good at these things. “Campfire, hey,” he tried again, “I ain’t this Tobias of yours. Tobias ain’t here.”

A long silence followed.

“I’m Dell, see? Dell Conagher. ‘Short bald jackass with a shotgun’, remember?”

Uncomprehending, she only stared, and shook.

 

* * *

 

It was a long while before she said anything else. Fact of the matter was she’d fallen unconscious again, and lay fitful and twitching against the dispenser. But finally, well after Dell’s stomach had started telling him it was more than past time for breakfast, she came back, blinking and slow. “Hey,” he said, as she shifted groggily, like she was trying to wake up. “You in there?”

The arsonist stopped dead before looking up at him. “ . . . what?”

“How many fingers am I holdin’ up?”

“More than one.”

He was holding up three, and that was good enough for him. “Can you move?” he said. She glanced up at him again, bleary-eyed. That one pupil was still huge, if not quite as wide as before.

At least she seemed to get the idea this time. Cumbersome and slow, she pulled herself to her feet, using the dispenser as a crutch. Her knees shook the whole way, even with all of her weight on the machine. Dell extended his hand to her, and she stared at it for a long time before understanding dawned in her gaze. “Conagher?”

“Yep. But you _can_ call me Dell.”

“Dell.”

“That’s right. Anything hurt?”

“Head. Stomach. Nauseous,” she said. She seemed heavy with exhaustion, and she was shivering even under all those clothes. Thank God he’d never taken that dang box onto the field, they’d have all been slaughtered. More than usual. “Where am I?” she said, and at last looked down to notice her decimated clothes. “What—happened?”

“Tell you later. C’mon now, take my hand.”

Another long silence. Then: “I don’t . . . think I can walk right now.”

He dropped his hand, and noted to himself that this all felt very familiar. “Alrighty then,” he said after a moment, and picked her up for the second time in as many days. This time she didn’t make a fuss, just sort of let herself be scooped up.

Dell called the dog, and it bounded ahead of them, tail wagging. He managed to kill the lights and lock the door behind him on his way outside, where the sunrise was just starting to paint the skyline. By the time they got back to the house and he lay the arsonist down on the couch, she was out cold.


	12. Aftershocks

When the arsonist had first come to she’d seemed alright. “Hey,” Dell had said to her when she finally stirred on the couch, putting aside his book (“ _Handbook of Peizoelectric Crystals_ ”, an interesting military treatise).

She didn’t say much for the first few minutes. Then she kind of looked at him, pupil still blown out. It took him a few seconds to realize she was looking through him, instead, and started steeling himself for another crazed outburst.

It didn’t come, though. Instead she sort of just pulled herself to her feet and looked around, very reverently, like she’d never seen the place before. Dell chewed his lip. “Campfire?”

If she heard him, he never found out. What she did do was turn to his couch, make a fascinated sound, and started stacking the cushions on top of each other.

It escalated quickly.

Dell watched, dumbfounded, as she draped the thick quilt he’d put over her over the desk lamp; as she threw open the blinds and tied bows in their drawstrings; as she turned every book on his shelves upside down, talking quietly to herself in a way he couldn’t understand.

Then she flipped the end table, letting the framed pictures and pencils and things clatter to the ground. He kept watching as she sat down in front of it, running her hands along it. Then without much obvious effort, she snapped half of one of the legs off.

“Hey!” he hollered, getting to his feet. She looked at him with about as much regard as she might give a gnat, and went back to ignoring him entirely.

Not knowing what else to do, Dell went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee. The snapping noises continued unabated. It had stopped by the time he looked in again a few minutes later. Now the arsonist was just sitting there, staring blankly at the half-mauled end table and the neat piles of wood she had apparently been making.

“You still crazy?” he said. Her head lifted, dreamlike, and she looked up at him. A moment later, she extended her hand to offer him a piece of wooden leg. Not daring to refuse, he took it. The arsonist went back to meticulously breaking his furniture apart.

So now he was sitting at the kitchen table, coffee in one hand and wood in the other, and wondering what on earth to do next. It had been hours since her exposure to the dispenser. Maybe this had its roots in something deeper.

Dell took a sip of his coffee and wondered who Tobias had been.

It wasn’t much later that the arsonist wandered into the room. In the light her filthy and bloodstained clothes only exaggerated her sorry condition; the front of her sweatshirt was more holes than fabric. For a few seconds she swayed on her heels, fidgeting with the bloody gauze that was still wrapped around her skull. She stopped as her eye settled on him, and he noted that her pupil seemed back to normal. “The living room’s messed up.”

Dell nodded.

“The couch cushions are—they kind of looked like Klondike bars. Big ones. That’s wood,” she interrupted herself, now looking at the shrapnel in his hand. He nodded again. The arsonist looked off somewhere else. “Oh.”

“What’d you think it was?”

“ . . . Chocolate.”

“Huh,” said Dell. “Well. I appreciate the  
sentiment.”

She said nothing to that. She had noticed her clothes, finally, holding the torn sweatshirt away from her chest to stare at it. “That’s . . . is that blood?” She glanced up at him. “This is blood, this is all blood.”

“It would appear to be blood, yes.”

“What in the mother of fuck happened?”

“You remember anything at all ‘bout last night?” He motioned her over to sit at the table.

She hung by the doorway. “Not really.”

“Found you in my garage last night,” he started, and waited to see her reaction. If her face changed, he couldn’t tell. “Weren’t in too good shape. This ringing a bell?” She only shrugged. “Well. You were makin’ friends with my sentry.”

Her eye narrowed in what he imagined was confusion, head tilting by degrees. “Sentry?”

“Sentry, turret. Automatic gun. I told you not to go in there,” he said, “though, given the fact that back door’s got a biometric lock on it I don’t think it was you opened it.”

“A what?”

“Bi-o-met-tric. S’Aussie technology. Only way that door opens is it gets my fingerprint. An’ I sure weren’t the one opened it.”

For a long few seconds she watched him, then dragged her gaze away. Soon she pushed off from the doorway and joined him at the table. Dell waited, patient, as she fiddled with the edges of her hole-riddled sweatshirt.

“I was outside,” she said at last, slowly and like she wasn’t quite sure herself, “and the lights in the garage went on. And the back door was open. So I went in, and I . . . ” Her words trailed off, and he could see her brow furrow. “You were there. But you didn’t have that bruise.” (Dell suppressed a wince at the reminder. She’d clocked him good, it still hurt.) “So I hit you—him—and he turned into, into this . . . into someone else. The masked man.”

That sounded right. Sounded right her first reaction would be to start swinging, too. Had to give her instincts credit, at least. He was just about to open his mouth again when she cut him off. “He said he was your coworker. Earlier, I mean.”

“Wait, earlier?”

“After I fell. I was on the couch. He—he gave me cigarettes.”

Dell could feel his temples starting to throb. Sneaky bastard had snuck into his house while he was in the garage. He sighed, and said, “You still got those?”

He could see her eye screw up in doubt, but she reached into her jacket pocket. With some difficulty, she extracted something that once upon a time had probably been a cigarette; now it was largely a collection of exploded paper and tobacco. But there was just enough there to calm him, a little: it matched the very distinct brand his teammate exclusively smoked. The enemy he suspected had not been in his house.

“Then he, he disappeared. He _disappeared_.”

“Yeah,” Dell said, frustrated with everything, “he’ll do that.”

It took him a second to notice the arsonist was glaring at him, that her eye was boring into him. “ ‘He’ll do that’ ?” she said. He blinked at her, and she went tense, hunched, angry. “You’re—you’re goddamn telling me you’re friends with some, some freak of nature that can turn invisible. I thought I was losing my fucking mind and you’re just _oh, he’ll do that!_ Where the fuck do you work that you’ve got magical disappearing coworkers?”

Dell could feel his long temper coming to an end, egged on by soreness and sleeplessness. “Now you just calm down,” he said, more sharply than he had intended. “It ain’t magic, it’s technology. Very advanced technology that would like as not take me the better part of a week to explain to you.”

“And him turning into a near-perfect copy of you is _technology_ too, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Bullshit.”

Dell snorted. “The fact my sentry shot you six ways to Sunday and you’re still breathin’ sure ain’t bullshit. Look, it’s right there on your damn shirt.”

Silence. The arsonist looked confused, just for an instant, and then her gaze dropped back down to her own body. Stained fabric and bullet holes. The dawning realization was plain even beneath the mask. “I . . . wait, but—he fucking stabbed me, I didn’t—” Then she was scrambling to feel her side, to find whatever wound the encounter had left her with. From where he sat, Dell could see her wildly investigating the space below her ribs. “He. He stabbed me, I swear to God, he did, there’s blood—and your thing went off on me—” Now she was feeling herself out for damage, bullet holes, any kind of wound. All she found were the tears in the fabric of her clothing. Dell could practically feel the air tighten as she wound herself up. “I don’t—don’t _touch_ me!” she snarled when he lifted his hand, as if that could stop her.

“Sorry,” he said irritably, and dropped his arm. “But if you’ll calm down for two seconds I—”

“I’m insane,” she announced, stumbling to her feet. “Goddamn loony, my God, haha, hahaha _haha,_ shit _,_ I’m making up guys that turn invisible and guns that rip you up without any holes, I’m, I’m, God, dear _God_ just shoot me now. I can’t do this.”

“Now look here—”

“Shut up, just shut _up_ —”

“No,” Dell said, “look here.” He’d picked up the shredded wood as he said it, leaning back in his chair. The arsonist went quiet, but only just, a terse and vibrating silence. She turned her whole body toward him, and was in the middle of snarling something else when he acted. He presented both wood and his free hand, and then very calmly ripped a bloody swath into his palm with the former.

That shut her up. “What,” she said.

Dell stood, making for the door. “You ain’t crazy.” (That was debatable. But mentioning it wouldn’t help things.) “I’ll explain what I can, but you’ve got to calm down.”

His ploy had worked, at least: she followed him relatively quietly back to the garage. That at least was worth the sting of his skinned hand. As he disarmed the door, she said, “I don’t understand anything about you.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard that.”

The blood on the cement ground had turned into a gaping dark stain. Beside it still sat the dispenser, cold and silent. “Now,” Dell said, leaning over to flip it on, “you got stabbed, right?” No answer. “An’ shot fulla holes.”

She stopped fingering the rips in her clothing. “I guess.”

He shook his head. “There’s no ‘I guess’ about it. Who else you think that puddle belongs to? Ain’t mine.” Lowering his hand to within range of the humming dispenser, he continued. “So last night my sentry alarm goes off. I get up and go see what’s the trouble and then I find I’ve got a shot-up arsonist bleedin’ out in my garage. Didn’t see anythin’ like a stab wound, but right then you were more holes than not.”

“Then why the fuck am I alive?”

“Well, for one you picked a fine spot to get yourself killed,” Dell said. “If I’d had to bring the dispenser all the way from here to the fields or like, I doubt I woulda got there in time.”

“Dispenser?”

He rapped his knuckles against the box, breaking out into a self-satisfied smile as the blue light of the machine reached up to wrap around his injured hand. “Dispense-O-Matic 9000. Well, this’n’s an 7500. Ah, I won’t get into specifics. But this little beauty here, she’s a regular hospital all on her own.”

The arsonist looked like she had something to say, and forgot it instantly once she saw the machine go to work. The light crept over the wound for a few seconds, and then it began to close. New skin replaced the raw, red scratches, steady and intent, and even the traces of blood vanished quickly after. Dell raised up his hand and turned it over: it was like it had never been harmed at all. “Just like that.”

When he looked at his guest again, she’d hunched into herself, staring pensively at the dispenser. It took her a long while to find what she wanted to say. Then: “Where did you get that?”

“That I can’t tell you.”

“How does it work?”

“Can’t tell you that either.”

She gave him a withering look. “So here you are, out in the middle of goddamn Nowhere, Texas, and you’ve got this, what, this magic box, and a big gun that shoots people on its own—and you hang out with people that turn invisible and shapeshift. That’s what you’re telling me.”

Dell scratched his nose, turning off the machine. “About that, yes.”

“Who are you?” she demanded as he hefted the dispenser up and began taking it back to its spot by the sentry. “Why the hell—”

She stopped short, and it took Dell a moment to see why. It was apparent immediately—she’d noticed the sentry. (He had to admit it was funny seeing her going stock-still like that, mid-step.) “It’s off, don’t worry.”

Slowly, she relaxed, though the suspicious look in her eye went nowhere. Instead she fixed her gaze upon the dispenser as he set it back down. “It heals anything?”

“Just about. Nothin’ already healed up, scars’n so, but she’s a real miracle of science. You were more or less on the edge when I found you, and here you are now.”

“Oh,” she said, and nothing more as she watched him draw the tarp back over it. She turned away as he checked over both it and the sentry for any tampering (couldn’t be too sure). He finished up and looked around just in time to see her rip something down from high on a shelf—

The light in her voice was not something he had ever heard from her before. “ _Shark_!”

Oh, God save them both.


	13. Questions

The sweatshirt hid a lot more than he’d assumed. It, along with the arsonist’s jeans, shoes, and shirt, currently sat in a garbage bin by the door, waiting to be taken out and shot. Again. Or burned. She’d enjoy that, Dell guessed.

One way or another, he’d coerced her back to the house, flamethrower in hand and its dented propane tank removed. Given her state she’d reluctantly agreed a change of clothes would not be remiss, and when she disappeared into the bathroom with what he’d scrounged up for her, he’d gone about the business of finding himself a shirt and pants that weren’t soaked in someone else’s blood.

When she came out almost an hour later in an old pair of his jeans and an oil-stained, overlarge white T-shirt, all he noticed was her exposed arms. They were scalded and scarred, topographical maps of Martian worlds. Patches of untouched dark skin (Spanish? Middle-eastern? Indian?) interrupted the red swaths like lakes or clouds, strange against their landscape. The bones of her wrists and elbows were sharp outlines of hunger, and two long white lines of scar tissue crisscrossed each of her palms. The mask was back in place; the gauze around her head was not. Dispenser got that too, he supposed.

She had been examining her palms, like she’d forgotten what was under the gloves. Then she caught him staring, her eye sunken and dark through the broken eyepiece, and flipped him off with both hands.

Dell paused where he sat nearby, fingers stiff over the guitar he’d picked up to pass the time. She drifted by him without a word, trailing down the hallway. She tripped over the rug, corrected herself, and staggered around the corner and into the kitchen. Dell followed, guitar in hand, and watched from the doorway as she collected the flamethrower from the kitchen table, where he’d made her leave it. Then, having it safely in hand, she turned, meandered toward the couch—her couch, he’d begun thinking of it as, just straight up “the arsonist’s couch.” She sank down onto it, cradling the machine the whole time, and pulled a blanket off its back to huddle into. Her razored hair was still damp, shining in the lamplight. He wondered how she managed to keep it short. “How you feelin’?” he said.

“Tihrredd,” she mumbled, her mask half-buried in the blanket. Turning, she pressed deeper into the corners of the couch, the machine like a favorite toy in her arms.

Dell could feel himself drooping. It was round about noon now, and he’d gotten maybe four hours of dozing, all told? It was an effort putting the guitar down to rest in its corner and pulling the blinds to block out the afternoon sun. “All right. Somethin’ goes belly-up, just holler. I’m goin’ back to sleep. Sleep tight, Smoky.”

He got no answer.

 

* * *

 

Seven o’clock.

Sleep-groggy and with a dull headache, Dell found himself nursing a coffee and watching the sun creep down toward the cotton fields. Man wasn’t meant to have his sleep tampered with so.

The arsonist had vanished again when he’d come downstairs. He wondered if he’d seen her for the last time. She’d left no note, no goodbye, but really—either would have been stranger to him than never seeing her again.

When she wandered in from the front door a few minutes later, flamethrower in hand, it took him a moment to get over his surprise. “Thought you’d left,” he murmured.

Her shoulders rolled in a shrug. In the light, with clean hair and clothes (it even looked like she’d rubbed down the mask last night), she was a sight less frightening than she had been a few weeks ago.

The table shuddered as she set the flamethrower down on it with a heavy thump. Without its propane tank it looked like nothing so much as a sad skeleton. She pulled up a chair, sat down in it stiffly, and then . . .

. . . and then nothing happened. Dell just looked at her for a bit, mystified as she did nothing else. On the whole she looked terse and uncomfortable. Her back was ramrod straight, instead of the animal-wild hunch he’d grown accustomed to, and her hands seemed to be alternating between resting in her lap or on the table, nearer her Shark.

It finally dawned on him that she might be trying to act civilized. “Got somethin’ to say?” he ventured, after a long stretch of this.

At his words she flinched, and tried very hard to not let him see that. “ . . . Yes,” she said at last, voice slower and clearer than normal. “Let me use your garage.” She hesitated. “Please.”

There we go. Dell sat back in his chair. He looked from her to the flamethrower, and back again. “So y’can fix that weapon’a yours, I reckon.”

“It’s not a _weapon_ ,” she said, before catching herself. “It wasn’t—supposed to be a weapon. It just sort of happened.”

“Well, now. How d’you figure that?”

“What would you do if two guys with knives had you cornered and this was all you had to fight back?”

He half-raised one hand in a gesture of understanding. “Fair enough. Where’d you get it?”

“I built it.”

Right. The blueprints, he remembered now. “Little ol’ you?”

She answered him with a deadly serious stare. That was all that came, and a moment later he sighed and put down his coffee. With an outstretched hand, he leaned forward to touch the battered flamethrower, though not without first looking to her for permission. He got a single, jerky nod back, but that was as much as he needed.

It was cool under his fingertips, and still held the same charm he’d felt when he’d first put it away up on the shelf. A grandiose wreck. “You need new tubing,” he said, “looks like you took a porcupine to this thing.” There was nothing in the way of information printed on the black hose that hung unattached from the handle. It had either never been there at all or had been weathered off long ago. “Can’t believe it held together with duct tape this long. You know what kind of—”

“Petroleum hose. Nitrile rubber. Four hundred pounds per square inch,” the arsonist rattled off instantly.

Dell stared at the tubing for a long few seconds before he found his tongue. “ . . . This about two-inch diameter?”

“Two and one-fourths-inch.”

Slowly, he nodded. And she carried on. “The valve plug is about gone, it’s all rust. Pipe’s doing okay, I guess. Needs cleaned. And the pilot light’s, there, the tube’s bent. Just spews gas half the time before it catches . . . dangerous.” A sigh left her as she rested a hand on the fat nozzle. “I shouldn’t have even been trying to use it, it was putting so much propane in the air. Would’ve blown myself up sooner or later.”

“Where’d you learn all that?”

The arsonist went still again. Dell waited, as quiet and patient as he might be around a spooked animal. But after a while she seemed to realize he could play the silence game as well as she could, and her shoulders slumped in a sigh. “Just. Somewhere. A long time ago.”

 

* * *

 

“What’re you planning on doin’ with that thing once it’s fixed?” Dell asked. He watched the suds foam and pop on the cement floor as he waited for an answer. Blood was hard as hell to get out of anything. His garage’s floor would never be the same, he imagined. When he looked up, both hands still on the mop, he found the arsonist with her back to him, still working busily on the flamethrower. “Still gonna burn all that cotton up?”

Despite himself he’d found he was right quick inclined to let her do what she would with the damn thing. Maybe it was out of pity, or maybe it was the sort-of guilt pulling at him, something still disturbed by the scene she’d made of herself last night and seemed to have forgotten entirely. Maybe it was just because she’d proved herself capable of communicating like a mostly-sane person, and in his experience mostly-sane was about as good as you were ever gonna get from anybody.

And he had more than an idea how important, vital, even, the bond between man and machine could be.

So one way or another he’d decided he’d just hide any propane tanks that might be laying around, and let her into the garage, on strict condition he’d best not find her in here without him. She’d stuck to him like a tick on a dog on the way there, and bolted in soon as she was allowed. The flamethrower was lain out and half the tools she needed ripped from shelves before he could say jackrabbit.

For the last three-quarters of an hour she’d worked in intense, concentrated silence on repairing the thing she called Shark. For his part, he’d puttered around fixing the mess had happened while he was sleeping. There were bullet-holes to patch and floors to clean. Questions to ask, maybe.

On the other side of the garage, the arsonist put down the blowtorch she’d been using. “I thought about it,” she said after a while.

“And?”

“I don’t need it for that. I’ve got my lighter. Could’ve done it my first night here.”

“What stopped you?”

He could practically feel the air go sour when he asked it, and again he got no answer.

That was the most he got out of her, though to be fair it was a lot, comparatively. The next hour or so was filled mostly with the hum of the electric lights, interrupted only when the arsonist might ask for a certain tool or part. She didn’t slow a bit until Dell decided it was about time to try and right his sleep schedule, and damned if she was going stay in his garage alone in the middle of the night.

Not a word of a complaint left her mask when he called her, to his surprise. She just put down the blowtorch she held, slid her hands over the flamethrower (not much yet improved, though getting there), hefted it up, and quietly followed him back to the house, the machine under one arm.

That was the sum of the next two days. Dell watched as the flamethrower slowly returned to its former glory, still a patchwork of parts but efficient, functional. And he learned how to coax conversation out of the arsonist, bit by bit, learned the rules of speaking with her for more than three-word exchanges: don’t look her straight in the eye. Don’t make any sudden movements. Don’t ask questions.

And of course he broke those rules, or at least the last one, as much as he dared, when he wasn’t busy with his own contraptions. If he was careful (and Dell Conagher was always careful), he could get her to drop hints, tidbits:

“What brought ya to Texas?”

“It’s warm. Doesn’t rain much. No snow either. I’m not gonna stick around Minnesota in the middle of winter.”

“You all the way from Minnesota?”

“That’s just where they kicked me off the train.”

And:

“Why ‘Shark’?”

“Don’t remember.”

Or:

“What’s that engraving? Yeah, the lighter.”

“Bible verse, I guess.”

“Number’s scratched over. You do that?”

“I think so.”

And when he’d asked what she meant by “think,” she shrugged and said, a little elusively, that she meant “think.” Couldn’t really remember. Maybe it’d been her. Maybe.

 

* * *

 

‘Course, he wasn’t really expecting her to ask questions back.

“Why didn’t you let me die?”

Dell, wiping grease from his hands with a rag, slowed. The little machine he’d been keeping himself busy with whenever the arsonist was in the garage with him stood inert on the cement, only issuing a soft beep once in a while. And the arsonist was always there these days, it’d been half a week and he’d already gotten used to her constant presence. Couldn’t very well get any of Blutarch’s work done with her around. “Had the means,” he started, eventually. “Didn’t seem quite right, lettin’ you bleed out on my floor.”

“I tried to burn your house down. I would have killed you if the flamethrower hadn’t fallen apart.”

“If you don’t mind me sayin’ so, I don’t believe you were quite in your right mind that night,” he said. “Don’t think bein’ hungry and maybe scared warrants a death sentence—”

“I wasn’t scared of you.”

“No? Might shoulda been,” Dell said, easy. “Either way. That’s bygones. And I’m not in the business of lettin’ folk stayin’ under my roof die if I got a say in the matter.”

She’d stopped working on the flamethrower. Without her huge black sweatshirt, Dell could actually read her body language: tense shoulders, head low. The back of her neck was pockmarked with scars, like fireworks. “All you would have had to do was walk away. Decided I was probably dead already. Or that maybe I deserved it, maybe I walked in front of it myself.”

“Missy, what is it that’s got you wantin’ to kick the bucket so bad?”

“Screw you, is what,” she said, twisting to look at him. Her words snapped at the air, sharp and acrid, sulfur and acid. “Fuck, haven’t you figured out anything about me?”

Dell raised an eyebrow. “Not that one.”

She glared at him, wild-eyed, for a long few seconds. Then she drooped. The sulfur evaporated, the acid drained away. She turned back to her work.

For a while, that was all that happened. Dell watched as she stayed hunched over the workbench, never moving but to fuss with something on the flamethrower, to adjust her mask, to light the Zippo. After a long while, she broke the silence. “I don’t,” she began. “Want to die, I mean. I don’t know why I said that.”

“Good to hear.”

“So,” she said, then stopped again. “So, uh.” Start, stop. Like a motor that wouldn’t catch. A moment later she looked over her shoulder. He could barely see what little of her face was exposed. “You saved my life. Thanks.”

Huh. Dell managed to offer her a smile. “‘Course. Hope anyone’d do the same, really.”

“No,” she said, turning back to her work. “They wouldn’t. They really wouldn’t. So, thanks.”

Half a week later, the flamethrower looked almost new, and the incident with the sentry—the fact there had been _opportunity_ for an incident with the sentry—still weighed heavy on Dell. It stained his thoughts the way the arsonist’s blood still stained the concrete, but he’d found no other reason for suspicion beyond what the arsonist had told him no matter how hard he looked. He changed the warehouse lock from biometrics to an alphanumeric twenty-four-character code, re-alarmed the sentry and added the arsonist to its database, and gone on a few sweeps with the dog, seeking anyone invisible that might be hiding in the corners. But if the interloper had really been there, he was long gone.

(Or well-hidden, Dell thought to himself with frustration.)

 

* * *

 

The phone call came the next day, shortly after he narrowly avoided a house fire thanks to the arsonist’s over-enthusiastic burning of her old clothes. (How did the sparks make it into the living room, he wanted to know. She wanted to see how far she could send them, she told him.) The phone started jangling almost at once when he collapsed into his easy chair with the newspaper, and did nothing to help his nerves. He snapped it up and said, “Dell Conagher.”

“Hello, Dell.”

Ah. He knew that voice. “Evening, Miss Pauling.”

“Good evening yourself,” Miss Pauling said pleasantly. Her words were crisp and brisk, just like her. “Things going well, I hope?”

Dell glanced at the new singe marks on his carpet. “Can’t complain, I s’pose.”

“Wonderful. I’m sure you know why I’m calling?”

“Well, I can only assume. But I’d bet you’ll be needin’ us again here shortly?”

“Yes, that’s right. Teufort, two weeks from tomorrow. Bright and early.”

Two weeks. Dell scratched at his head, easing back into the chair. “Alrighty then. You take care now.”

He could hear her amused smile over the phone line. “I will, Dell. Goodbye.”

The phone settled back into its cradle with a soft clack, and Dell frowned at the ceiling.

Exactly twelve seconds later, something crashed spectacularly in the kitchen. It was followed by a suspiciously muffled yelp. Dell sighed, and got up to go see what trouble the arsonist had gotten herself into this time.

Two weeks. He had two weeks to figure out what to do with the arsonist.


	14. Requital

The days ticked by.

It was a Monday, and the only thing on Dell’s mind at the moment was the work on the top-secret machine he’d had to keep pushing further and further back due to the arsonist’s presence. Still didn’t trust her alone with his tools; definitely couldn’t trust her around _that_.

He was in the garage, alone for once. The arsonist—well, he didn’t know where the arsonist went. She’d been here a little while ago, until he’d given her the boot because damn, he really did need to work on that thing. Oh, she’d put up a bit of a fuss, dragged her heels some, but she left without much else.

Now, the doors shut and locked, he found himself looking at the sentry. “‘Scuse me, darlin’,” he told it, picking the whole thing up with ease. He set it down some five feet away with its nose pointing outward, where it beeped and did nothing more.

Where the sentry had stood was plain cement floor. It looked like it, anyway, until Dell tugged his wrench out from his overalls, knelt down, and tapped the floor in three places. A seam appeared where there had been none before, a five-by-five square. It was heralded by a hiss and whir of some hidden mechanism. The disguised flooring (for that was all it was) sank down, and Dell now looked at a stairway that led into the floor itself. He spun the wrench in his hand, tucked it back into his pocket, and went down.

Deep it went, a story’s worth of steps. Then the steps stopped being steps and started being floor. A wide, windowless hall of steel and brick stretched out before him, hazed blue by the lights that fuzzed to life at his passing. Workbenches and shelves still lined the walls, but the tools on them were fewer, more specialized. It was nearly silent, almost every sound blocked out by thick cement walls. And there, at the other end of the hall and on a round platform covered in mounted lights, stood the machine.

It wasn’t much to look at, really. Came up to about the chest, wheel-mounted for easy transport. Looked a little like a cartoon car, come to think of it. Bars separated a clear acrylic bowl filled with a gently-simmering blue liquid from the outside world, and half-a-dozen wires spilled out amid its many rivets and buttons. A tube thick as his leg snaked down from the back, and lay like a tail on the ground behind it. The black wires that hung from its end were unattached, waiting. It hummed, not quiet but not loud either, and the liquid in the bowl burbled softly.

Blutarch Mann’s new immortality machine, pieced together from the very blueprints his grandfather—who was also in the pay of Blutarch Mann—was a pretty vast improvement over the old one, if Dell thought so himself. And he did.

He ran his hands over it, inspected it. Nothing had been disturbed, no dust had risen since his last trip here. Good. The damn thing really was nearly done, but the arsonist’s sudden appearance had thrown all his plans out of kilter. And he couldn’t very well saunter down to his secret basement with her in there fixing her flamethrower.

Dell let himself have a private sigh of relief, and in the same instant came a sound he knew too well, one that threw every last nerve in his body alive with lightning. It was the crackling-whisper of a cloaking device deactivating, just inches away, the sound of someone invisible becoming real again.

He was painfully aware that he didn’t have his gun. Instead he ripped his wrench from his pockets and whirled, ready to slam it into the jaw of the intruder. What happened instead was a startlingly strong hand catching his wrist and twisting it hard. His only weapon clattered to the ground, and the feel of something narrow and metal jabbing into his gut stopped him from trying anything else.

“ _Bonjour_ , my friend,” said the man Dell knew only as the spy from RED. He smelled of smoke this close, even without the signature cigarette both this man and Dell’s own teammate loved, acrid and overpowering. He was grinning like a shark. “Fancy meeting you here!”

Dell grit his teeth. “Finally come slidin’ outta your hole, snake?”

“Oh, come now. Give me some credit, Engineer,” the spy chuckled. “We both know I’m better than that. Though I must say, I was not expecting all this secrecy.” He gestured to their surroundings as a whole. “I’m impressed. _Truly._ ”

Dell said nothing. The revolver dug into his hipbone, and the spy said, “Would you kindly step away from that machine?”

“How’d you get in here,” Dell answered, and his words were roughshod iron.

In reply he got a husky laugh, and the spy driving the gun harder against the bone until he moved. Hands up in surrender, Dell edged to the wall. “Thank you. And I never left, obviously.”

“Mind tellin’ me how you got away with that?”

The spy smiled, the corners of his mouth bunching the edges of his balaclava, but said nothing. He stepped away from Dell, gun yet trained upon him, and lay a gloved hand upon the inert machine. “I suppose this is it, then?” he said, unimpressed. “Smaller than I’d imagined.” He rapped it lightly with his knuckles, and then kicked it over.

It hit the ground with a terrible crash and a terrible roar as the delicate mechanisms were disrupted, and Dell jumped toward it without thinking, a shout caught in his throat.

There was a bang. Very soon after he found himself on the floor, his back to the wall and lead in his gut. He got one glance back up at the spy and his smoking gun before the pain caught up with him. “Calm yourself!” the spy said. “Goodness, man. I’m sure it’s salvageable for someone of your inclinations. Or it shall be, if you will be so kind as to give me the location of its blueprints.”

On the floor, the machine rumbled and growled. Dell clutched his stomach, fighting to draw breath. The spy seemed entertained; he eased back and leaned against the overturned immortality machine, watching. “Just one bullet and you go down? Fascinating! For some foolish reason I had expected better out of you.”

“Go t’hell,” Dell hissed through grit teeth.

The spy chuckled and tugged a silver cigarette case out from a pocket in his suit, a twin to the one Dell’s ally carried. The next time Dell managed to raise his eyes (head swimming with pain and fire), the spy had lit it, put it to his mouth, and returned the tin box to its home. He puffed out smoke, like a dapper red dragon, and said, “We can do this all night, Engineer. It will be much simpler for everyone if you only cooperate. I ask very little, do I not?”

Blood seeped through his overalls, his clothes, painted the floor. It sent fragments of memories bubbling to the surface: the smell of gunpowder, the mottled shouting, the electric tang of the dispenser beam. He’d been shot before, he’d been shot plenty, but generally he was running on enough pure adrenaline and caffeine that it was a lot easier to ignore—

The spy sighed and put another bullet in him, this time in the leg. Things went fuzzy and dark around the edges.

By the time he could see straight again, the spy was halfway through his cigarette. His gun had been replaced by a sleek, beautiful butterfly knife. There were drops of blood on his suit, and Dell wondered if somehow they were his, but they looked old and dried.

“I’d rather not do it like this, you know,” the spy said. “I am not a psychopath. Not like some of my colleagues. I’m simply here on business, from above, surely you understand. We can end this here and now if you tell me where the blueprints are.”

Dell said nothing. It wasn’t too hard, all things considered. He’d been through worse, sure—much worse, comically worse—but getting shot never really starts to hurt less. The spy sighed, and shook his head. A minute or two later, his cigarette a burning stub, he pushed off from the growling machine and dropped it to the ground, where he burnt it out with one patent-leather shoe. “All right,” he said, voice flat with boredom as he knelt down in front of Dell, “then I suppose we’ll start with your fingers.”

It wasn’t hard for the spy to seize up Dell’s hand and lop off the last third of his ring finger. Dell howled, tried to rip his hand away, to no avail. The spy hummed to himself, and then severed Dell’s thumb. Pieces and parts of the rest of the fingers of his right hand followed.

Finally he stopped, wiped the knife off on the bloodstained overalls. Dell was curled into a ball of agony, scarcely aware of anything. “Your odd little friend has been a thorn in my side,” the spy said, conversationally. “It was most inconvenient for me that he survived. Carelessness on my part, though—I assumed the sentry would do my work for me. Really, I should have had the blueprints and been gone days ago. But such is life, I suppose.”

He got no response, and so lit another cigarette instead.

The next time Dell opened his eyes, he felt like he’d stumbled into a funhouse. Everything was warped and startling. The machine seemed louder. Someone was speaking, but he couldn’t really hear it, not yet. Blood soaked his clothes. Something dark was moving behind the spy.

He managed to lift his head up, and he saw a demon—he saw two, the first in red and spitting smoke. Behind him stood a thing with a silicone head and boiled skin and a green garden rake in its hands.

“Campfire?” Dell said, thickly, in the same moment that the arsonist brought the rake down onto the back of the spy’s neck.

There was a wet crunch and a choked shout. The spy’s knife made a ringing sound as it flew from his hand and bounced off the wall.

Dell watched the spy fall. He was laid out on the white tile, and the tines of the rake had scraped down his body until they found purchase in his back. Until the arsonist ripped them up and away, anyway. The spy screamed.

Blood fell from the rake, dripping to the floor. Dell stared in silence as the spy slowly, agonizingly pushed himself up. The arsonist watched, too, until the man in red had managed to get to his hands and knees.

She brought her weapon up, high over her head. It hung there for a moment as she stared down at him, suspended in the space between seconds. The spy stared back. Then the teeth of the rake scraped the ceiling as she slammed it on the spy’s back again.

Dell had never heard anything quite like the sound the spy and the rake made together. Neither had he realized how far the drops of blood could fly from a wound like that. It smeared his goggles, his cheek. His lips tasted of iron, and he couldn’t be sure where it came from.

The arsonist let the rake touch the floor, watching the spy. Again he tried to get up, and succeeded once again in getting to his knees. In a surprisingly fluid movement he rolled onto his side, so close Dell could feel his body heat. He reached into his jacket, and whipped out the revolver.

The arsonist rammed her foot into his gut the instant he moved, and he curled up with a gurgle of pain. Then she did it again. The gun fell from his fingers.

She tightened her grip on the rake, and lifted it a few inches from the floor, like she was going to swing again. But instead she let it clatter back down, shoulders dropping. Dell could hear her ragged breathing even over the roar of the immortality machine.

“Get out,” she said.

The spy glared up at her, his breath coming in haggard bursts, his face and mask streaked with blood. She met his gaze. “Get out,” she repeated, louder, “get out, or so help me God, I will break both your fucking legs and light you on fire.”

Dell watched as the spy shakily got to his feet. The arsonist stepped out of his way, watching silently as he staggered toward the stairs.

Everything was hazy under the pain, but Dell groped at his side with his good hand until his fingers curled around the smooth ivory grip of the revolver. It seemed heavier than it should be as he lifted it up, and his hand shook when he took aim.

He squeezed the trigger as the spy turned to look over his shoulder, one bloody gloved hand reaching for his watch. There was a bang.

The spy’s head splattered blood on the wall.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the arsonist startle, jerking backwards as the man in red fell forward. He hit the ground, and did not move.

Dell let the gun drop, and slumped back against the wall. “Good riddance,” he said, and blacked out.

 

* * *

 

The cigarette was burning out. Dell could smell it, the smoke wafting up to him from where he sat.

Stirring, he lifted his head. He regretted it instantly as the world veered at a sharp diagonal. He could have sworn he was underwater. Nothing would hold still.

A hum as old and familiar as his bones was boring into his aching head, and as he inhaled he got more than just stale smoke. A crackling ozone scent hit him, followed closely by blood.

Blood. Right. Dell tried to look around. Not much had changed. The toppled immortality machine still rumbled nearby. He shifted, and his arm bumped something cool and metal.

“Conagher?” said a voice.

“Yeah,” he grunted, trying to sit upright. Dear God, everything ached.

“Did it work?” the voice said, sounding a little unsure. “The, the thing. The box.”

He blinked, and tried looking around again. A little ways away he found the arsonist, crouched with her back to the wall, clutching her lighter. She was watching him, stock-still. He looked from her to the dispenser, and back again. “You, uh,” God damn it, he couldn’t think, “you bring this down here?”

“I couldn’t exactly carry you up the stairs.”

Breathlessly, he nodded. He wet his lips and looked down at himself, his blood-soaked clothes. He raised his right hand in front of his face, and counted five fingers, whole and undamaged. “Guess—guess you went an’ returned the favor,” he managed, dropping his hand into his lap. The arsonist, still watching, said nothing.

He laid eyes on the immortality machine, and winced to see it still grumbling on its side. Gotta lift that back up, he thought, and was surprised to watch the arsonist pause, and then move to do so. He must have spoken aloud. He couldn’t remember doing that.

The pain was slowly being replaced by something approaching dementia. No wonder the arsonist had acted so strangely—she’d been on it for hours before she woke up, and judging by the still-burning cigarette he had only been out for a few minutes. “Thanks,” he said as she hoisted the thing back onto its wheels. “It still working?”

She shrugged. “I guess. What is it?”

“S’a—jus’ a project . . . not somethin’ you oughta know ‘bout, really,” he said. “Say, how—how’d you get in here, anyway? Thought I locked that door . . . ”

“I heard yelling. Gunshots. So I broke a window.” She cast a sidelong glance at the thing on the ground. “Thought you were coworkers.”

Dell shook his head, mostly to himself. He shifted slightly and said, “No. Not that one. One I work with’s got a blue mask.”

“Oh. That’s the one I saw, I think.”

“In here?”

“No, in the living room.” He could just make out her furrowed brow. “The one that gave me the cigarettes and disappeared.”

Dell grimaced, and tried to sit upright. He nearly made it, lost his balance, and wound up slumped against the wall again. He watched as the arsonist wandered aimlessly through his hidden room, touching nothing, but her very presence here made him uncomfortable. Couldn’t’ve felt more uneasy if she’d gotten into his bedroom, probably. But she moved past the stacks of rolled-up blueprints without looking at them, the dozens of secret prototypes without lingering. Then at last she stopped, in a corner sort of, mostly obscured by a freestanding rack of shelving. The dispenser blocked most of his view of her, but he could tell she sank down to sit with her back to the wall.

A minute or two passed. Dell checked his leg, his gut. He still felt woozy with blood loss (or maybe it was just the healing rays), but they were slowly closing. The bullets had already been expelled from the flesh, a bizarre sight that never got any less unsettling.

He was pulled from his thoughts when the arsonist said, “Dell?”

“Yes’m?”

“The body.” She hesitated. “What’s it look like   
to you?”

Dell blinked, and looked. His lip curled a bit: he saw gore and blood, all a shade fuzzy under the tint of the dispenser. He would have sworn parts of the flesh were crawling with maggots, if he didn’t know exactly what might be making him see that. “No-good dead rat. Why?”

“Oh,” she said, quietly. “No reason.”


	15. Change

Dell didn’t really remember the trip back to his house, or how he got to his room. Vaguely, he could recall the rusty smell of blood on both his and the arsonist’s clothes, and that she’d almost dropped him on the way over. That was it—she’d had to sling his arm over her shoulder to help him walk. She was taller than him, he’d realized. Normally she hunched too much to tell.

He woke up something like five hours later, mad as hell. Still in his blood-covered clothes, he high-tailed it out to the garage, cussing out the spy and every feasible aspect of his lineage the whole way.

The arsonist was sitting outside, like she was waiting, cross-legged with her back to one of the garage’s cement-block walls. She had the dog by her, its head resting in her lap. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not until her head whipped around to look at him as he came near. Her hand shot to the flamethrower, laying beside her, but then she relaxed. “You’re awake,” she said, then stopped, like she thought there was something more to be said but didn’t know what.

Dell let a sigh rattle out of him. “Sure am. No small thanks to you, either. Saved my bacon there.”

She stared at him, then looked away, shrugging in a way that looked painfully awkward.

“He still in there?”

“I didn’t touch him.”

Ugh. There was a body in his garage. There was a body in his secret bunker, and it was a Godforsaken spy. With a sigh, he unlocked the garage’s door and stepped inside. A few minutes later, with the arsonist’s help, he had wrapped up the blood-soaked body in a tarp and carried it upstairs. Hell if he knew what to do with it from there. He said as much.

“Burn it,” the arsonist said.

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, firebomb, we can’t burn it.”

“Why not?”

“Well . . . ” He groped for an answer. Couldn’t find one. “I mean, the smoke . . . ”

“Conagher,” she said, “do you think I don’t know how to handle that kind of thing?”

 

* * *

 

He built a crematorium. Didn’t take long, a day and a half, with the arsonist on hand to give him the numbers. It was like she had everything there was to know about fire and heat engraved on the inside of her skull. Flesh ignited at 1,400°F. The machine should be able to go up to at least 1,600°F. Propane would result in less smoke. When he asked her how she knew, where she’d learned these figures from, she just got this glazed look in her eye and wouldn’t say anything.

“So,” the arsonist said quietly, a little after they’d loaded the body into the crematorium and started it up. “Why’d you kill him?”

Dell hummed to himself. The flames roared. “Couldn’t let him go. Minute he got down there, it was either me or him.”

“How come?”

He sighed. “Dammit, Smoky, you and your questions.”

“I had it under control. He could barely walk.”

“Thing about spies is you can’t ever really be sure about that. Specially not that one.” Dell spat on the blazing machine. “Perfect god-damn actor an’ too much tech for his own good. Hell, I wouldn’t even count on that thing in there really bein’ him.”

That quieted her.

They watched the fire rage for a long time, bathed in heat. It was just beginning to die down again when the arsonist said, “I guess I didn’t take you to be a killer.”

“Heh. That bother you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just burn things. I don’t kill people.”

_Black Ice Stadium fire kills twenty-three_.

“Well,” he said.

_Tobias._

When the fire had died down, they collected the bones and crushed them before burying them in one of the sweeping empty fields.

 

* * *

 

Dell spent the next two days cleaning up the mess, best he could. By then the arsonist had really finished her flamethrower, missing only a propane tank, and honestly he was pretty sure she’d just light-finger one off one of his neighbors if she couldn’t get one from him.

But that weighed less on his mind than the issue of his imminent return to work, and what would be done with the arsonist while he was away. She couldn’t simply be left behind. Intentional or not, he suspected he would return to acres of ashes if he let her stay here on her own. Sending her on her way—especially with that weapon, dangerous once again—was plain irresponsible, and it wouldn’t sit with his conscience besides.

He could take her with, he considered once or twice. She seemed dangerous enough for his line of work. Crazy enough, too. But no way management would go for it.

A week out from his departure date, though, the decision was removed from his hands entirely by a knock at the door. When he answered it, he found himself face to face with a very short, very prim-looking young lady in a violet dress and cat-eye glasses, holding a briefcase. “Miss Pauling,” he said, taken by surprise.

“Good morning, Dell,” she said, and offered him a smile. “May I come in?”

“‘Course,” he said, standing aside and holding the door for her. “Now just what’s got you comin’ down here? Somethin’ wrong?”

“Oh no, don’t worry. I’m actually here to speak with your friend. With the gas mask?”

Blindsided, Dell stared at her. “You know ‘bout that?”

“We do, yes.” Miss Pauling paused to set down her briefcase on the chair and smooth out her dress. “Is she in?”

_And_ Pauling knew the arsonist was a woman. Hell, Dell had only become really sure of that after watching her for a few days, talking with her. He scratched his temple. “Well, I think so. Spends most’a her time in the living room anymore, prob’ly in there. Won’t do nothin’ but read that science fiction stuff.” He gestured for her to come with him, off to look for his guest. Pauling picked up the briefcase and followed.

Shortly after she’d finished the flamethrower, the arsonist had sort of . . . gone off a bit. A bit more. She’d gone right back to carting it around like a kid with a security blanket, for one, though Dell didn’t mind so much. Meant she wasn’t doing anything else with it.

But immediately after that, she’d taken the blanket he’d left out for her soon after her appearance and constructed a sort of fort behind the couch with it, held up with the kitchen chairs (he hadn’t tried asking for them back yet) and a broken lamp (he didn’t know where that had come from). It spread from the couch to the fireplace. Fair enough, he didn’t have anything resembling a spare room to offer her; but a blanket fort? He’d stopped making blanket forts when he was ten.

That was where she was when he and Miss Pauling stepped into the living room, and anything else he’d thought to say trailed out of his mind, because the arsonist was speaking aloud. She faltered now and then, stumbling over the words and correcting herself, sometimes stopping entirely to make a sharp, frustrated sound.

“ . . . a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his—his fists, with this great python spitting its venon—fuck—venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the . . . no, wait . . . ”

There was a rustle of pages, and Dell eased over a few degrees to see into the fort.

Inside sat three things: the dog, half-napping; the flamethrower, safe and innocuous on the floor; and the arsonist, leaning against the edge of the fireplace, reading to both of them from an old and tattered book.

She didn’t seem to notice him. “ . . . Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by fl—flame . . . ”

Without preamble, Miss Pauling pushed gently past him. She crouched down at the front of the tent, and it was her presence that pulled the arsonist from her story. Startled, she let the book fall into her lap, her head whipping around to face the stranger. On some instinct she reached for the flamethrower, useless as it was without its tank.

Before she could say anything, Pauling asked, “ _Fahrenheit 451_ , right? Ray Bradbury?”

Dell stared. The arsonist stared. “Yeah,” she said.

“I loved that one,” Pauling said, leaning on her knees and smiling. “The beginning especially. Clarisse was my favorite.”

When the arsonist said nothing else, her eye boring into this new stranger like a laser, Pauling extended her hand. “You can call me Miss Pauling,” she said smoothly. “Pleased to meet you.” Seconds passed. Dell counted a full ten of them before the arsonist took it. Pauling didn’t miss a beat.

“I’m here representing the company our friend Mr. Conagher works for, the Builder’s League United,” she said. “We’d like to offer you a job.”

 

* * *

 

The woman named Miss Pauling had said, “Essentially we’d like to pay you to set fires,” and the arsonist had replied, instantly, “Oh, fuck, yes. Yes.”

She didn’t really remember much else that happened between that and getting into Pauling’s Cadillac. Conagher had looked stunned stupid the whole time, that had left an impression. Pauling had asked her if she needed to bring anything and she didn’t, God, what did she have besides Shark and her lighter anyway? What else did she need?

Then they were on the road, Conagher standing on the porch watching them go. The first thing the woman named Miss Pauling said as they pulled away was, “I’m so glad you said yes. We found your work at the stadium very impressive, you know.”

The arsonist looked up sharply. “What?”

“The hockey stadium a few miles away? Enormous structure. And you took it down all by yourself. The fire department couldn’t even figure out where you started it, everything went up so completely.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

This made her new associate chuckle. “Oh, gosh. Don’t worry. You’re not in trouble. Even if you were—well, we can make all that go away.” They turned off the old dirt road that lead to Conagher’s house and onto the highway, and the arsonist found herself staring out the window at the tiny farmhouse. “You’ve made a very good choice for your future by joining us.”

They knew. How did they know? She’d been so careful, she’d—there was no way they could have found that out, found out it was her. Even the article in the paper had chalked it up to a fault in the building, a blown gas main. “That wasn’t me,” she said, with more force. When she looked down, she found the lighter in her hands, but she didn’t remember having taken it out.

Miss Pauling gave her a patient glance. “We also happen to know that you, among other things, caused an explosion at a bookstore in Wyoming, completely burned down a textile mill in Kansas, and destroyed most of a forest in Tennessee. And that flamethrower of yours on its own has left at least thirty-five people in six different states with severe burns. Sixteen fatalities, I think?”

“Fatalities?”

“Well, yes. I imagine taking well over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit to the face is traumatic enough to cause death. Are you surprised?”

“I . . . ”

Was she?

“I was particularly a fan of the textile mill,” Miss Pauling went on as the arsonist fiddled with the lighter. “That was artful. They had to get the fire department from the next county over to come help, didn’t they?”

_Textile mill._ A wall of memory came crashing down over the arsonist, a gush of color and sound and panic, all blurring and bleeding into the distant howls of sirens and the very near screams of people. It all faded and smeared together, obscuring the details but: yes, she had done that. She’d forgotten.

“I . . . only meant to get the Greyhound terminal next to it.”

“Happy accident, then?”

She wasn’t sure. “How the fuck do you know that was me?”

“BLU has a great deal of resources,” Pauling said. “We deal largely in information, and we’ve been interested in you for a while.”

“How long is ‘a while’?”

“Just a while.”

This was bullshit. This was psychotic. Abrupt second thoughts that hadn’t bothered occurring to her when Pauling had said the words _job, fire, no catch_ began to swarm her mind. Her grip around the lighter tightened, and she found herself wishing to God that her flamethrower, lying inert in the back seat, had its propane tank. “If you know all that then you know I’m out of my goddamn head,” she snapped. “Why the hell do you want _me_? No one needs a, a, an insane pyromaniac around.”

“That’s why the job title is ‘Incendiary Pyrotechnician,’ not ‘Insane Pyromaniac,’” Miss Pauling said smoothly, still smiling. “You’re the best person we’ve seen for the job. Believe me, we’ve looked. But if you’d like, I can turn around. You can go right back to what you were doing, though I don’t know where you’ll go when Dell ships out next week.”

The arsonist thought about it. She said nothing else.

 

* * *

 

It was dark by the time they arrived, pulling to a stop in front of a sprawling building complex done up all in blues and grays. There was someone waiting for them, and once the arsonist stepped out of the car, numb-legged and tired, he scuttled toward them, began speaking in hushed tones with Pauling. The arsonist pulled Shark out of the back of the Cadillac and checked it over for damage.

A few minutes later she was being ushered through hallways and up stairs by the man, a stooped-over middle-aged creature who didn’t look twice at her or her gutted flamethrower. In an eerie turn of events, none of the people they passed even spared her a glance.

Somewhere along the way she came into possession of a tray of some kind of mass-produced meat-and-potatoes thing, and then she was being shown her temporary dorm, with the man’s promise that there would be a proper introduction to everything in the morning, and by the way, welcome to Builder’s League United. Then he went away, and she shut the door.

The room seemed fine, if sparse. A shaded bulb on the ceiling kept it well-lit, and there was a bed and a dresser with a mirror and a lock on the door. The window-blinds lay half-shut, letting the last dregs of light in. She locked herself in immediately, and next she clapped the blinds closed. Isolated, she sat down on the bed and put the tray aside.

She unbuckled the straps on her mask, and the black plastic dropped down to her lap. She took a deep breath and started coughing hideously. At some point breathing had gotten more difficult than she thought it was probably supposed to be. The fit passed after a minute or so, and she set the mask aside, where it stared blindly up at her with its one lens.

Her face hurt, like it always did when the mask came off.

She glanced up at the mirror—couldn’t see herself from the angle she was at on the bed. A dull curiosity for what she would find if she looked into it hung at the back of her mind, like a sticky, clammy fog, but she ignored it. Instead she took another survey of the room. Dingy carpet, bare walls, dim light. A little too warm. It was a vast improvement on most of the places she had stayed in her driftings.

Better than Conagher’s couch, she thought, and better than the blanket-fort that had appeared as if by magic a few days ago, too. (At least, she didn’t remember building it.) Privacy was the thing. The mask couldn’t come off around someone else. Even loosening it to take those pills with Conagher around had made her gut clench and her head fill up with panic, and it made eating a constant exercise in hiding. She had become very good at timing her meals with Conagher’s absences.

But she didn’t have to worry about that, now. Instead she ate, and flicked her lighter on and off, and ignored the way the mirror pulled at her. She had looked maskless into the mirror in Conagher’s bathroom the night she was shot, and she was still recovering from that.

The next thing she knew, someone was banging on the door. She jumped, and stopped in confusion when she found herself covered in a blanket, curled up with her back to the wall on the bed. Her flamethrower was at hand, like it should be. Her mask had returned to her face, and the plastic was warm from the beams of sunlight filtering down onto it through the drawn blinds.

More lost time. But on the plus side, she realized as she pulled herself out of bed—no nightmares.If she had drowned or sunk or been swallowed by the ocean, she couldn’t remember it. Come to think of it, she hadn’t had one since she was shot by Conagher’s gun.

The door was still locked when she reached it. Behind it was Miss Pauling. “Good morning,” she said brightly, adjusting something on the clipboard in her arm. “Ready to get started?”

 

* * *

 

The next few days were a blur. Pauling, and others who left much less of an impression, trotted her back and forth across the premises. The arsonist was pretty sure she had signed at least a tree’s worth of releases or contracts or NDAs after the first day, one after another, all so dense with type that even considering reading them gave her a headache. She just scrawled a big black ‘X’ on each one.

Things got more interesting after that. For one, Pauling personally showed her how to handle a shotgun, and as it turned out there was a shooting range directly on site. The arsonist was less surprised than she thought she should have been.

“Who are we fighting?” she had asked, watching Pauling as she loaded the shells with easy efficiency.

“The Reliable Excavation/Demolition group,” she said. “RED, for short.”

“RED versus BLU.”

“Right. Funny coincidence, isn’t it?” Pauling smiled. “I think that’s the first question I’ve heard you ask the whole time you’ve been here. Most people ask why we’re fighting.”

The arsonist just shrugged. _Why_ wasn’t important.

After that, later in the evening after she had shut herself up in her dorm with her dinner, she found her new uniform on the bed. It consisted in part of a thick, blue chemsuit that covered the whole body. A stylized flame emblazoned either shoulder, and the included gloves went up to her elbows. The attached tag proclaimed proudly NEW! IMPROVED! LINED WITH ASBESTOS FOR YOUR PROTECTION! A surprisingly light tank of what was apparently oxygen lay on the bed beside it.

The other piece of the pyrotechnician uniform was, sensibly, a gas mask. It was shiny black, brand new with functioning filters, and as she looked at it, it occurred to her that no one—not Miss Pauling, not a single one of any of the BLU employees that had lead her to and fro the whole time—had said a thing about her own mask. None of them even seemed to have noticed it. It was a nice change.

She took hers off, just to compare the two. The difference was dramatic, between the missing lens and uncountable scuffs on her old friend and protector. God, she hated that missing lens. She’d thought about patching it over with duct tape a few times, but her shoes always needed it more. The new one even covered all of her head instead of just her face, and something about that appealed to her.

But when she tried the suit on, the new mask stayed on the bed.

She wore the uniform the next day, the whole thing, except the new mask. Pauling said it looked good on her as she led her to an empty, cavernous conference room, and handed her a stack of folders before leaving again.

The folders contained brief—very brief—summaries of what were to be her new teammates. Included in each was a bad black-and-white photograph and a short description (and thank God it was short), but it took her a while to realize what was out of place.

None of them had names. Not even Conagher’s was officially listed. Instead everyone seemed to exist only under their job title—Sniper. Medic. Demoman. Scout and Soldier and Heavy. She just barely recognized the man who had given her the cigarettes in the photo of the Spy, and Conagher, in a hardhat and goggles, grinned out at her from the Engineer’s folder.

Well, that was just fine. She wasn’t sure she could remember her name anymore, anyway. It seemed to be just out of reach every time she tried to think of it. Sometimes she wished she had told it to Conagher when he had asked, because she sort of thought she could still remember it back then. He could have reminded her.

That left her as the Pyrotechnician, Miss Pauling had said as she showed her the company-issue flare gun the next day. “But I’m sure you know how it goes, with nicknames and all. Dell gets called Engie, the Demoman’s just Demo, that sort of thing. I imagine they’ll call you Pyro—some of the boys around here already are.”

The day passed quickly, and by the time it ended the arsonist wasn’t sure what all had been done, really. On her last night, sitting in her room, she took inventory. She had a flameproof suit and a piece of paper listing her new paycheck, something with a lot more zeroes on it than she had ever anticipated. (What the hell was she going to do with all that money? . . . Stop being one of the homeless insane, she guessed.) She had a brand new propane tank for the flamethrower. And she had a sort of idea she was supposed to shoot it at people wearing red, somewhere far away.

That, and she had the new mask. She had avoided it, though she wasn’t sure why. Well—because it would be replacing her entire face, probably.

The thought startled her, a little, and she wondered when she had started thinking of the mask as her face. She pulled it off and looked at it again, traced the sharp leftover fragments where the lens had shattered months ago.

Then she put it down, and looked at the mirror.

Her face began to hurt again. Most days the pain faded, for whatever reason, she couldn’t understand why. It certainly seemed, to her, like it should hurt all the time.

She stepped in front of the glass.

There. Like always. Fresh agony washed over her as she studied herself, trying not to wince. It was funny; where the lens had broken, where people like Conagher and Miss Pauling could see beneath the mask, her skin was smooth and good. Convincingly human. She could even fool herself, if she looked into a mirror with the mask on. The pain wouldn’t come, at least.

The arsonist stared into the mirror for what seemed like a long time before lifting a hand and touching her cheek, right on the edge of where the raw, unhealing wounds sat, festering.

What skin she had left was charred to black and red, and what wasn’t exposed skin was exposed muscle. Blood, wet and warm, dribbled from her nose and the corner of her usually-masked eye, drooled between her teeth. Her eyelashes and eyebrows had been seared away, her tear ducts melted shut, her nose was a misshapen lump of angry red wax. One side of her mouth was pulled up in a permanent sneer, scar contracture from wounds that had never even been within shouting distance of a doctor twisting up into a permanent grimace.

_The dispenser hummed._

_“It heals anything?” she asked._

_“Just about,” Engineer said._

_Bullshit._

Bleary-eyed, dizzy with pain, she blinked at herself, as if that would make the thing in the mirror go away. But it just stared back.

 

* * *

 

On the last day at 7 AM sharp, she was ushered outside, suited up and with flamethrower and the company-issue suitcase filled with what she guessed were necessities to normal people in hand. Conagher’s truck was idling before her. He startled badly when she came around the passenger side and opened the door. “Whoa now,” he said, and then relaxed a bit as he studied her. “Heck, campfire, that you under there?”

“Duh,” she said, slinging her suitcase into the bed of the pickup. “What are you doing here?”

Conagher squinted at her, head tilting by degrees. He was wearing a hardhat and goggles, the same ones from his folder. “Sorry?”

“I said what are you doing here?”

“What am I doin’ here?” Aggravated, she nodded. “Got here last night, myself, got to get briefed on the mission. Looked for you a bit, no luck there. They brief you?”

She had no idea. “Yes.”

“Good, good.” Oh, he understood that. “Anyway. BLU ain’t got a car for you or nothin’, thought I’d give you a ride.”

“Oh,” she said, and got inside.

“How’d it go?” he asked. At first she opened her mouth to answer, and then opted for an exaggerated shrug instead. _Fine, I guess._ It hadn’t occurred to her that the new mask would muffle her so badly, that much of her voice had escaped the old mask due only to its missing eyepiece. “Good t’hear. So you’re our Pyro. Funny world  . . . say, they tell you much ‘bout the team?”

“A little,” she said, holding up a finger and thumb with about an inch between them to indicate. Conagher—Engineer? The Engineer shook his head, grinning.

“Heh, well, they’re—ah, you’ll meet ‘em soon enough. I’ll warn ya now, they’re a bunch of . . . characters.” He paused to fiddle with his seatbelt. “They tell you ‘bout respawn?”

“About what?”

She saw his brow raise. “They didn’t, huh. Mm. Don’t you worry ‘bout that. I’ll show you when we get there.”

And that was it, mostly. They drove off. The miles were filled with Engineer chattering easily away. He seemed excited, she thought. He told her stories about the team—how the Demoman lost his eye, or how he said he did; the Soldier’s war stories (“Tall tales, every last one, but damned if he don’t believe ‘em through and through.”); that the Heavy had entire operas memorized, in both English and his native Russian; how the Scout would swear up and down that once he had absolutely-for-real fought four guys with nothing but his bat and a wrapped fish, and won . . .

His steady stream of words seemed endless, and it was calming. It had nearly lulled her to sleep, some hours later, when it came to a sudden halt. Jarred by the lack of sound, she blinked awake, and glanced over at him. He was frowning, sort of.

“Hey, uh,” he began, and then stopped again. “Heck. Forgive my askin’, but who’s . . . ”

He trailed off. Silence swallowed up the air.

Engineer drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “It’s just you, uh. Said a few things the night you got messed up by the sentry. Got me mighty curious, been on my mind. Don’t know if you remember that.” But when she did not answer he shook his head. “Ah. You know what, never mind. Ain’t my business. Sorry.”

The arsonist gazed at him a while longer before looking back out the window.


	16. Interlude II.

 

“You said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

—Emily Bronte.


	17. BLU

**June 6 th, 1968**

The world jostled, then rumbled to a halt, and the Pyro woke up.

It took her a bewildering few seconds to sort out why the whole world was a slightly smoggy beige, instead of just half of it, or what on earth she was doing in a car. It came together, in the end, and she was left to take in her new surroundings.

The sun had sunk low into the horizon while she’d been asleep, and it cast everything in shadow. At most she could make out the high angles of buildings nearby, and the arch of what seemed to be a covered bridge in the distance. The dark had crept on enough that she nearly missed the shaded figure making its way toward them.

To her left, the Engineer killed the truck’s engine. He hadn’t any sooner opened his door when the person approaching them (a tall and thickset man with skin even darker than hers, true black, and stubbled face, and an eyepatch covering his right eye) slung an arm over the truck’s roof and said, “Evenin’, lad!”

“Evenin’ yourself,” Engineer said, shaking out his legs. “Al _mighty_ , that drive. Locks my knees stiff every time. I’m gettin’ too old for this.”

The man scoffed. “No such thing! An’ it’s always worth it, yeh?” He spoke in a long, drawling way, stretching his “O”s like taffy and rolling every “R”, clearly foreign but not something she could place.

The Engineer gave him a sort of sharp, fierce grin, one the Pyro had never seen from him before. It looked strange on him. “Hell, wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

Hefting her flamethrower, the Pyro opened her door and stepped out onto dust and weeds and hard-packed soil. She wondered where her new employers had sent them; she had a sort of feeling that was something that had probably been in one of the gargantuan stacks of paper she had neglected to read. But it wasn’t important, really. What was important was that the air filtering through her mask was dry and sharp and hurt her throat. Things would burn well here.

On the other side of the truck, the Engineer and his friend (one of her new teammates, she guessed—she didn’t remember which one) chatted amiably about whatever. Bored, and because she hadn’t been able to do it for what felt like centuries, the Pyro pointed her flamethrower at a stunted patch of green poking up through the dirt and pulled the trigger.

Fire blossomed out of the nozzle, more stunning and beautiful than any flower. It consumed the plant without effort, blasting the ground around it with heat as it shriveled and curled and turned black. A familiar sense of glee bubbled up somewhere just around her lungs and floated all the way to her head, and she kept the heat on until the plant was nothing more than ash. When she finally stepped back, much more at peace with the world, she noticed that the men were watching her, silent.

Engineer cleared his throat. “S’pose you heard ‘bout our new teammate?”

“Pyro, aye?”

“That’s right. Pyro, meet Demoman. Demo, Pyro.”

“Evenin’ to ya,” said the Demoman, and he leaned bodily over the hood of the trunk to offer her his hand. The Pyro stared at it for slightly longer than was proper before taking it, and when she did take it she wished she hadn’t. Demo had a grip like a vice, and he smelled so strongly of alcohol that she could pick it up through her mask.

“Hi,” she said.

If Demo understood her he sure didn’t let her know. “Thas’ a lot you’re wearin’, lad. It hot in there?”

She thought about it, and shrugged.

The Demo seemed to take her at her word, and let go of her hand. He and the Engineer spoke a bit more while she shook her fingers out, trying to get the feeling back into them. When she looked up again, they were hauling things out of the back of the truck. Lacking anything better to do, she grabbed her lone blue suitcase from the pickup’s bed and followed them toward the base.

Everything was quiet, and there seemed to be nothing but the two forts around for miles. On the way inside she saw exactly one raccoon, six ants, a collection of dry and drooping weeds, and what might have been a camper van, parked off way in the distance behind the BLU building.

Then they were inside. It was well-lit, enough that she needed to squint even under the mask, and Engineer winced and tilted his head down. It was cleaner than she’d expected. Safety posters kept cropping up on the blue-and-white cinder block walls, until they turned to drywall and the industrial factory feel became significantly more relaxed. It occurred to her that she could hear something, and the something sounded like the racket of a television.

They turned a corner into what looked like someone’s very loose idea of a living room. From the door, the Pyro could see a couch and a handful of raggedy-looking armchairs, gathered around a television that was entertaining itself. A wolf-skin rug missing a leg and an ear was spread out on the floor, and a handful of faded and creased Playboy centerfolds pinned to the walls smiled out at no one. A bookshelf mostly occupied by things that were not books stood off in a corner, and on the very far end of the room, by a window, was a table with two men sitting at it, playing cards.

“I’m back, boys!” roared Demo, dropping the Engineer’s luggage without ceremony. “With friends!”

The man on the right looked up. The first thought that occurred to the Pyro was _That isn’t a person, it’s a bear_. He was enormous, an utter giant, with an equally huge jaw and hands she was reasonably certain rivaled basketballs in size. He was bald, and had fixed them with an intensely serious look. Opposite him, looking about as large as a rabbit by comparison and more concerned with his hand of cards than with the newcomers, sat a man with a pince-nez, and features so sharp you could cut yourself on them.

The giant spoke first, his intense stare becoming a grin. “Engineer, welcome back!” He had a huge, booming voice, as large as he was. This man was the Heavy. He couldn’t be anyone else. “Who is tiny masked man?”

Oh. He meant her. The Pyro shifted the suitcase she was holding to under her arm and raised one gloved hand. She dropped both it and her flamethrower and yelped when the Demoman clapped her heartily on the back. “Our Pyro!”

“The Pyro has arrived?” said the man with the pince-nez, looking up at last as she scrambled to rescue her machine. He had knife-like eyes, sharp and piercing, and they were locked squarely on her. “I trust he has received the mandatory physical, _ja_?” He had an accent too: edged, and sort of nasal. _German_ , she thought.

Then she processed what he had actually said. Her eyes narrowed under the mask. No one had said anything about a fucking examination. “What, hell no—”

The Engineer interrupted her muted answer, sounding unimpressed. “That’s Medic, Pyro, and never you mind him. He just wants to see if he can get your stomach open. Be plenty of time for that on the battlefield, doc,” he added, giving the Medic a deadpan stare.

The Medic grinned, with far more unnaturally white teeth than the Pyro thought was probably normal. “Had to try,” he said breezily as he turned back to his game, and lay one of his cards down on the table. The Heavy scowled at it, and the Pyro was sort of surprised the card didn’t melt or something when he did.

At her side, the Engineer shook his head and picked up the dropped luggage. “C’mon,” he said, “We’ll show you the barracks.”

They led her further into the belly of the place, weaving through hallways. All was quiet for a while, until Demo said, “Y’were a bit cross with Medic, there.”

The Engineer grunted.

“Weren’t that your joke in the first place? Back when Scout came, aye? Ha! The look on ‘is face when Doc pulled out that bonesaw!”

Engineer sighed, and didn’t answer at first. “Don’t mind me,” he said after a while, and the Pyro missed the glance he cast at her. “Had a long drive, is all.”

 

* * *

 

The barracks were huge, and dense. Twenty or more bunks, easily, tucked way in the back of the place, in a repurposed warehouse. The tiny windows high above them did nothing but make everything feel more crammed together.

The Demoman had left them, and now she could hear him howling with laughter at something all the way down the hall. For her part she had just walked the aisle between the bunks as Engineer unpacked, looking. She had so far determined which bed was the Demoman’s (it smelled as strongly of whiskey as he did), and guessed the two next to each other, one with a huge gun sitting on the top bunk and one with a bust of someone labeled Hippocrates resting on the pillow, probably belonged to the Heavy and the Medic. All the rest were untouched.

“Go on and pick one, Pyro,” Engineer said, drawing her out of her thoughts. He seemed to like having something to address her by that wasn’t of his own invention. The Pyro watched him for a moment as he stacked books up next to his bunk. Most of them were thicker than her wrist, and had names like _Practical Capacitors_ and _Acceleration Vector Theory_. He put a particularly beat-up one on top, admired his work, and then looked back to her.

A few seconds later, he was chewing his lip in thought. “Though. Don’t guess you’d rather your own room?” Yes, she would most certainly rather that. Engineer had to hold up a hand to put a stop to her emphatic nodding. “Right, sure. That new mask of yours don’t look too comfortable to sleep in. Plus, you bein’ a lady and all.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Didn’t catch that.”

“You know what, forget it.”

He looked at her a minute, all thoughts well-hidden behind those goggles. Then he just shook his head. “Got a room over the way Pauling stays in sometimes when she needs to stop in. Y’might have to fight Spy for it if he’s here, though, he likes his privacy.”

Spy? Spy—that was the masked man, that was right. The one who gave her cigarettes and disappeared and—

_The spy was laid out on the white tile, and blood dripped from her rake, and her vision was fuzzy and flickering. She was having trouble holding onto—onto what? Reality? The thing, the, the man on the ground, she_ knew _he was a man, and yet his legs kept changing, first like they were broken, then as if both his feet had been ripped off, then curled up like a dead spider—_

_—she looked at the thing on the ground, the thing that used to be the man in red, and instead of a man there was a coiling, writhing terror inside the suit, an ancient horror, and his bones had been sucked away and all that was left was sickening, writhing tentacles._

_No-good dead rat, Conagher said._

_Oh, she said._

 . . . Engineer was saying something. “ . . . react to havin’ a woman on the team. I mean, s’up to you, but I’ll keep on playin’ like I don’t know no better if that’s what you want.”

What the hell was he talking about? She stared at him a second before throwing him a thumbs-up. Sure, whatever. The Engineer glanced at her hand, and nodded and said, “Alrighty then,” and that was that. Whatever “that” was.

It wasn’t long before Engineer got her situated in her new room, which turned out to not have any invisible people in it at all, spies or not. (She had checked. The walls now had scorch marks.) It had a bolt on the door, which was now turned, and the window overlooked some kind of canal that curved around the buildings, too high for anyone to look in. She was on the third or fourth story. She had a book, too: Engineer had brought some of his sci-fi novels along, even looked like he’d picked up some new ones. He’d left them here with her, her and her flamethrower. The one she had picked up first was called _Dune_ and it wasn’t terribly interesting so far. There was too much of things not happening. It seemed like a politics book, and anyway the words were giving her a headache.

Around the time she got fed up enough with it to put it down, hunger had kicked in, and she wandered back out into the base to look for the kitchen—the mess or the canteen or whatever it was in a military setting.

The whatever-it-was was actually quite nearby, just down the stairs, and she found it with no trouble. It had a low roof and one cracked light, and the floor was a linoleum tapestry of scuff-marks. There was a long table in one corner, with eight chairs around it. It, like everything else she could see in the kitchen, was made out of steel or aluminum or something. A tiny window behind the sink showed only the blackness that eclipsed the secluded base, and she could hear crickets as clear as if they were inside. Maybe they were.

She was alone, anyway. She pulled open the fridge and poked around until she found a slightly mushy apple, someone’s sandwich, and an enormous chocolate bar. Satisfied, she took all three, and turned—

“Bit of advice, wouldn’t take the sandwich.”

The Pyro stopped dead, fingers clamping down on the food tightly enough to rival rigor mortis. She looked around wildly and saw nothing until something at the very darkest corner of the table shifted ever so slightly.

There was a hat, and it had one side of its brim pinned up to the crown. Under the hat was a long face, and the face was pointed down at a newspaper that he could not possibly have been able to make out in the darkness. The rest of the man (for it was a man) was slouched back deep into the chair. He was resting his feet on the table, near a pair of folded-up sunglasses. For a brief moment he glanced up at her. “Hear me?”

“Uh.”

“I’d put it back if I were you, mate.” He had the instantly recognizable drawl of an Australian. Everyone on this damn team had an accent. Did BLU hire people by spinning a globe and pointing? “Heavy’s sandwich. Not fond of people touchin’ his things, him.”

She looked down at the sandwich in her hand, and considered how much she wanted to piss off the giant in the other room. Then, with care, she put it back. The man nodded, and went back to ignoring her.

She spent the walk back to her room trying to remember who in the folders had that hat. It had been in there somewhere, she was certain. She mulled over it as she re-bolted the door and shed the chemsuit, climbing into bed with food and a different book in hand.

Nothing. More of her memory jacking up. Fuck.

Fifteen minutes later, she pitched the book across the room, where it collided with the dresser and fell to the floor with a satisfying smack. None of the words made sense.

She went to sleep, and did not dream.

The Pyro woke the next morning, still dark outside, to screaming.

She was a light sleeper, had been as far back as she could remember. The screaming threw her scrambling for Shark so quickly that she fell out of the bed and right onto her ass.

Startled and sore, she picked herself up and pulled on the chemsuit and mask. The screaming continued. She grabbed the flamethrower, then flung open the door.

The screaming abruptly increased in volume.

On the other side of the door, inches away, was a man in a helmet that completely covered his eyes. He had carried on howling uninterrupted even after she had come face-to-face with him, and didn’t stop while she took this in. Hell, he seemed to take it as encouragement.

It took a full five seconds, but she realized there was actually meaning to the noise rattling out of his ribcage: “—BREAKFAST AT 0600 HOURS, SHARP! I WILL NOT TOLERATE SORRY LAYABOUTS LIKE YOU IN MY RANKS! DO YOU THINK THIS IS A FUNLAND? DO YOU THINK—”

Jesus. She lowered the flamethrower and took a step back. “Who the fuck are you?”

“—INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO ME THAT THEY WOULD SEND WEASEL-NECKED CANDYASSES SUCH AS YOURSELF INTO WAR—”

Of course he couldn’t understand her, she’d forgotten already. She glanced over her shoulder at the clock—6:12AM. It was too early for this.

“—WANT TO SEE TERROR IN THAT MASK OF YOURS, FIREBUG! TERROR OF ME! TERROR OF—”

Automatically, she lifted up the flamethrower so the nozzle was directly under the man’s chin and pulled the trigger.

There was a seething hiss of fire and the agonized screech of someone whose whole face has just been set alight. He staggered back until he hit the wall, trying to cover his face with his arms. The Pyro just followed, focusing the stream of flame on his head.

The fire stopped shortly after the screaming did, and the trigger only clicked when she pulled on it, spitting fumes. Letting the nozzle drop, she peered down quizzically at the burning mess on the ground. Why had she done that?

_Firebug,_ whispered a voice in her head.

Oh, she thought, as the sprinkler system turned on.

 

* * *

 

The Pyro had ducked back into her room and bolted the door when the first of her teammates rounded the corner into the hallway. She had spent the last couple of minutes ignoring the knocks and trying to decide if she would die if she jumped out of the window or not. No matter what Ms. Pauling had said about BLU being enlightened and progressive, there was simply no way she still had a job after murdering one of her coworkers.

She had just decided to try her luck with the jump and had one boot planted on the windowsill when the door swung open. In spite of her better instincts, she turned to look.

What greeted her was not the shocked and outraged mob she had expected. Instead there was a wiry man in a blue mask and suit, holding a lock-pick and looking wet and unimpressed. “Out the window, really?” he said in an accent that was all too familiar. “You’d break your neck.”

She stared. Behind the man she knew to be the Spy, the Demoman leaned into view. “This your work out here, aye?” Baffled, she nodded. “Heh. Soldier’s got that effect on people. Hell, can’t say I haven’t wanted t’do that a few times m’self!”

What the fuck. Slowly, she lowered her leg down from the window and turned. The Spy stepped out of view, pocketing the lock-pick as he did, and the Engineer took his place. He was wearing the same getup as the spy in the garage had been, blue shirt, brown overalls. “You know,” he said, “most people woulda just shut the door on him.”

She made a disbelieving noise. “I just, just killed your fucking teammate and that’s all you have to say about it?”

Engineer squinted slightly, uncomprehending. Beyond him she could see the rest of the people she had met the night before, all in a half-moon around the charred corpse. None of them were looking at her, or shooting her that half-afraid, half-horrified look she had at some point become accustomed to. Instead they mostly looked annoyed, wringing out their clothes and glancing up at the sprinklers.

The Engineer glanced back at them, and then to her. He seemed to take the hint. “You ain’t in trouble. C’mon. Need to show you somethin’.”

 

* * *

 

The respawn room, as Engineer called it, looked nothing like the rest of the base. It was clear on the other end from the barracks and living quarters, closer to the bridge end of the outfit, and situated at the back of what looked like a locker room. It was pristine and perfectly white, separated from the lockers and benches by doors made of safety glass. It had tiled walls and a quiet, constant hum, and an ozone smell that got into her mask and wouldn’t leave.

And the Soldier was standing inside of it, perfectly whole.

The Pyro balked the second she saw him, helmet and all, dusting off his clothing like nothing had happened. Before she could do anything at all, he was striding purposefully out between the glass doors, directly toward her.

She stopped dead, heart lurching up into her throat. She took one step back, then another. She had just twisted to bolt when Conagher touched her shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said.

“All right, are you fucking kidding, do you—”

“REPORT, CADET,” barked the Soldier, stopping in front of them. “NEWS FROM THE FRONT?”

“Just an accident. Pyro’s kinda got a hair-trigger,” Engineer said. “Nothin’ of concern.”

“Ah-HA! Spy-checking already, were we?” The Pyro flinched as the Soldier rounded on her, positively beaming. “EXCELLENT! Sharp’s the word, boys! Those filthy REDs could be anyone and anywhere. We’ll make a trooper out of you yet! See you at breakfast!” He slapped her hard on the shoulder, and strolled out of the room.

The Pyro stared after him. She looked over at the wholly calm Engineer, then back at where Soldier had gone, and at last sank down to sit on the ground right where she stood.

At her side, Engineer chuckled. “Yep. That’s what most of us did the first time we saw it happen.”

“I fucking emptied my flamethrower on him.”

“That’s respawn for ya,” Engineer said. “Give it a little blood, little DNA, you’re immortal as long as you’re in its range. Wipes the memory some, that’s why he didn’t know what killed him. Mandatory in our line’a work, actually. RED’s got one too. Surprised BLU didn’t tell you about it.”

She had absolutely nothing to say. She gaped   
at him.

He smiled, picking up on her dumbstruck silence even fully masked. “I know, I know. Scared me at first, too.”

“I. So, what, we just—we can _come back to life_?”

“Yep. Death, killin’ even—no consequences. Not here.”

That was the moment, Pyro reflected later, that she lost interest in science fiction. There was no reason to read it anymore. She was living it.

 

* * *

 

The Scout was late, and very little else pissed him off more.

First off the train had been late. How the hell is a train late, okay, that didn’t even make sense. By the time they’d pulled into Ramsey, the bigger town he took a bus from to get to Teufort and the BLU base, said bus had already left. The Scout was left waiting another hour and a half before the next one came along.

By the time he set foot on base, fingers drumming on the baseball bat slung over his shoulder impatiently, he was exactly three hours and twenty-six minutes late, and by God did he want to kill something.

It was a matter of personal pride. He was the _Scout_. Being fast, faster than anyone else, was literally his job. He wasn’t late, ever, unless he meant to be. Like to Soldier’s “mandatory” morning exercise regimes. As if he was going to lose a good hour’s sleep to do jumping jacks and get hollered at.

So, pissed at the universe and starving (he’d skipped breakfast. And lunch), the Scout stalked toward the towering mess of metal that was BLU’s Teufort headquarters. He ignored the Heavy just outside the door, who did likewise, too busy cleaning his stupidly huge minigun to look up; brushed off the Demoman’s slurred greeting; carefully made his way unseen past the Medic’s open infirmary door.

He dropped his luggage and bat off at the barracks and made a beeline for the canteen. If history repeated itself either the Spy or the Sniper would have made the team some ridiculously overdone breakfast. They had some kind of rivalry thing going, Scout didn’t know, or care for that matter, hell, it meant good food (sometimes) and lots of it. Including leftovers for days.

He scarcely noticed the Sniper and the Engineer sitting at the table as he went straight for the fridge. They were bent over something, one of Sniper’s guns or lenses or whatever maybe. “You’re late,” Sniper said as he walked past.

“Hey, you can go screw a koala, you know that?” Scout snapped, and opened the fridge. “I ain’t late, war don’t start ’til tomorrow.”

“Professionals, standards,” Sniper answered in sort of a sing-song murmur.

“Oh my God shut up, I swear, your friggin’ _standards_ , keep ‘em to yourself, alright? Christ, where’s the food?” The fridge was barren of the leftovers he had expected. There was a bottle of ketchup, to start, and what might have at some point in its life been a block of cheese. “Sniper, what the hell.”

The Sniper ignored him, fiddling with his gun’s lens. Engineer glanced at him. “Say, yeah, ain’t you and Spy still in a squabble ‘bout food? Usually one of you two tryin’ to show each other up at breakfasts, as I recall.”

Sniper shrugged. “Thought about it. But you lot just don’t appreciate Vegemite.” Scout tilted his head back and made an exaggerated gagging sound. “See?”

“That’s cuz it ain’t _food,_ it’s like, it’s freakin’ salt in axle grease. You Aussies is cracked.” Grumbling, the Scout picked out a banana that had seen better days from the racks. He turned, opening his mouth to say something, and then—stopped.

Someone new was sitting silently at the table, by the Engineer, someone in a bulky rubber suit and a shiny black gas mask. They were perfectly still, and their mask was pointed at him.

“ . . . Jesus,” Scout said, after a moment, “who’s the gimp?”

Sniper laughed. Engineer snorted. “Our new Pyrotechnician,” Sniper said, not looking up from the scope. “Nice bloke. Say hello, Scout.”

Silence followed. The Scout glanced at the stranger again—took in the flame emblems on its shoulders, noticed the flamethrower laying on the ground by its feet—slowly let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and stopped fidgeting with the dog tags around his neck.

It was just a new teammate.

“Weird outfit,” he told it, and left the room.

 

* * *

 

“That’s Scout,” Engineer told her after the guy with the dog tags had left. “Got kind of a temper on him, an’ doesn’t shut up besides, but he’s alright.”

The Pyro didn’t hear him. She was thinking. She was thinking so hard it fucking hurt, but there was something—something just on the edge of her memory—

A sharp pain stabbed through her head, right behind one eye.

She hissed sharp and low, and it rattled out of the filter as a shaking wheeze. “Pyro?” Engineer said. “You alright?”

“I’m,” she said, standing, one hand on her head. She waved off the Engineer when he lifted a hand, as if that could help. Instead she fumbled for a grip on her flamethrower. “I’m fine,” she said, heaving it up, knocking it hard on the table as she went. “I. I need to go.”

And she staggered off, dizzy and nauseous. Her heart was pounding. The Scout’s words were bouncing around in her head like Superballs—no, not the words themselves, just how they were shaped by his voice and his accent—the accent, that was it, she knew that accent like the back of her lighter, she’d heard it a thousand times in a thousand voices. Where? How?

It came to her with the force of a thunderclap, and she stumbled to a halt in the middle of the hall.

“Boston,” she mumbled aloud. “Boston. I used to live in Boston.”


	18. War

Boston. The Pyro carried the word on her lips for the rest of the day, mouthing it silently to herself, learning the shape of it. She didn’t remember living there, she didn’t remember anything about it, but that was where she had lived—before. The conviction was almost paralyzing.

But her revelation aside, nothing much else happened that day. She did not see the Scout again until dinner, and by that time she was too mystified with what she had learned of the rest of the team to pay him much mind. The Medic kept uncaged doves in his office. The Demoman had worked his way through three and a half bottles of whiskey since the day began and he could still walk in a straight line. The Soldier could go for well over an hour without ever dropping his voice beneath a bellow or running out of things to say. And no one cared about her mask. There were comments made, sure, but she could count them on one hand. It was a relief.

The next morning, when the clock read 6 AM, sirens snapped her awake. For the second time in as many days she lurched out of the covers in a panic, diving for where her flamethrower rested by the foot of the bed. By the time she’d strapped herself into her suit and mask, the piercing scream of the sirens faded. Disoriented, she stepped into the hall, leaving Shark behind lest there be a repeat of what happened to Soldier.

She didn’t walk directly into the Engineer, but it was a very near thing. “Whoa, hoss,” he said, putting out a hand to stop her. He gave her another of those sharp, cut-glass grins. “Mornin’. Ready for war?”

War. That was what they had called it at BLU headquarters, too. How the hell could it be a war if there were only nine men on either side?

They walked to the canteen, and Engineer gave her the low-down. They’d go over strategy at breakfasts, usually, though it was all fairly loose. Get some coffee in you, you’ll want the caffeine. And don’t wander off in the beginning, at least not at first.

Everyone else was already seated and eating by the time they got there, and the Pyro slipped in between Heavy and Spy. From what she could gather, sitting silently at the crowded table and listening to the eight mercenaries around her, their job was to obtain and capture sensitive intelligence from the RED base while preventing the enemy team from doing the same. It sounded easy enough, she thought, after it was mostly over and she was piling food onto her plate to take back to her room.

She was on her way out when someone said, “Hey, what the hell, you ditchin’? We ain’t done talkin’ strat here.” Turning, she found the Scout, sitting at the end of the table nearest the door and watching her.

“I think I got the gist. I’m hungry.”

“Man, no one can understand you mumblin’ under that freakin’ thing, just take it off already.” When she did nothing, he leaned back far enough in his chair to tilt it and gave her a leer. “Oh, I’m sorry, what, you too ugly to show us your face? Is that it?”

The Pyro made a derisive sound and left, ignoring the eight pairs of eyes that followed after.

 

* * *

 

The war began at 9 AM, and at 8:59 a sound as sharp as needles filtered through the speakers posted all around the base. “Mission begins in sixty seconds,” it said in a woman’s voice. “Prepare to capture the enemy intelligence.” The Pyro, running her hands along the ax someone had given her and wondering what was going to happen, jumped when the Heavy nudged her.

“Voice is Administrator,” he said. “Is very angry, all the time.”

“Aw, she’s a freakin’ blowhard,” Scout cut in. “Always yellin’ about how we all suck, what’s she know, she ain’t the one down here gettin’ shot an’ stabbed an’ blown up, whatever, she can bite me.”

“Is also very dangerous,” the Heavy rumbled low to the Pyro. “But, little masked man should not worry. Is just voice, mostly.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, just in time for the sirens to blare the beginning of the fight. Everyone but her rushed out; more slowly, she followed.

From the battlements, just left of respawn, she could hear gunfire and shouting. She went to the right instead, down the stairs and into the enclosed courtyard. Engineer was in the corner, occupied with building something. She passed down into the first floor of the base, quietly, and found it deserted. Out front she could hear fighting.

Further in, she found a stairwell, two short sets of metal steps curving down beneath the base. Nobody had said anything about a basement. The Pyro glanced behind her, found no one, and headed down. She was midway down when she stopped dead.

Water. Brown, murky water lapped at the steps, swallowing up almost half of the second set of stairs. It flooded the lower floor, pooling in from a broad tunnel that went maybe two hundred feet before opening out somewhere brighter.

Water.

She stared at it, wondering why she hadn’t put two and two together when she first saw the bridge. When bile started rising in the back of her throat as she looked, she bolted back up the stairs.

The base had gotten quieter in the few minutes she had been gone. Most of the noise was focused over on RED’s side of the territory now. She scarcely noticed; she was having trouble breathing. The edges of her vision were filling up with sparkles and bubbles that vanished when she tried to look at them.

Then she was on the battlements, watching Sniper. How the hell did she get here.

Whatever. “Hi,” she said.

“Wouldn’t stand there,” he said, without looking at her.

Two seconds later, the RED sniper got her. Blew her head clean to pieces. Sniper told her later it was one of the most amateurish potshots he had ever seen, but the way her brain splattered the wall behind her had been a real treat.

Ten minutes later she came back with a huge panicked gasp, enough vertigo to send her crashing into the wall when she tried to walk, and no memory of what had killed her. Flawless white tile shone all around her, and she staggered through the respawn room’s doors sucking down the clean air her oxygen tank fed to her. It wasn’t until she was outside the locker room doors again that she realized her flamethrower was in her hands. She gazed at the weapon for a full ten seconds before choosing not to question it.

Still feeling a little sick, she took a right again, toward the base’s courtyard. A soft, familiar beeping cut through the air. She froze until she saw the Engineer waving at her from across the wooden catwalk that stretched across the length of the yard.

“Hey,” she said as she approached him and his sentry. It wasn’t as big as she remembered. “Respawn sucks.”

“What? Oh,” he laughed, pulling out something from the toolkit he was building the sentry out of. “Yeah, I try to avoid it myself. Heck, Smoky, can’t hardly understand a thing you’re sayin’ under all that. What was wrong with the old mask?”

She was about to answer when the sentry chirped in alarm, its muzzle jerking down at something—no, someone—that had just zipped into the courtyard. His shirt was crimson, and the Pyro thought she heard him say, “Aw, shit,” just as the sentry began to fire.

Blood splattered the dirt, but the RED escaped as quick as he’d come. Next to her, the Engineer laughed to himself. He pulled out his pistol, checked it, and looked back toward the locker room. The Demoman was just walking out—swaggering, really. “Hey, Demo! Can I get a trap on the doors here?”

“Aye, lad! An’ we got two uv’em comin’ ‘round the front door, fattie ’n rockets!”

Great, they had jargon. Tightening her grip on the flamethrower, the Pyro trotted down the stairs and watched as the Demoman shot bizarre-looking little spiked balls around the edges of the paths into the courtyard. “The hell are those?” she asked.

“Say wha’?”

“The . . . things,” she repeated, gesturing to them. “What, are they—”

“Boyo, I haven’t got a clue what you’re sayin’ an’ I’m too drunk to care,” he answered cheerfully. He swayed on his feet, jogged backwards, and called to the Engineer. “They’re comin’ in!”

“Right. Pyro, hey, c’mere.” Engineer eased the sentry to the side as she joined him again, pointing its nose at the doorway. “Just in case. Now watch this. Three, two . . . one.”

The Pyro looked down at the doors. A giant in red was bulling his way forward through the lower doors, an enormous minigun in hand, and behind him she could just see another man in a helmet much like the one their own Soldier wore. They barreled around the corner, ignorant to the things on the doors behind them, and focused instantly on the Demoman. Demo just grinned and threw them the bird.

There was an enormous flash of light, a great booming of sound and screams. The Pyro flinched and threw herself backwards—

_(—when what was left of the building exploded—it was huge, an imperious blaze—)_

“Get down!” Engineer shouted over the roar, pulling her to the floor by her arm. She dropped just in time to have a rocket slam into the wall above her, where her head had been seconds ago.

She cursed aloud despite not even being able to hear herself through her ringing ears, suddenly nauseous. She looked down, and where the enemy heavy and soldier had been there were only bits and pieces of men.

Engineer said something to Demo. She didn’t catch it, trying to get back to her feet on legs that felt like they had gone to jelly. By the time she managed it, the remnants of the bodies were gone. The Demoman was still crowing in victory, and as she watched he pulled out an honest-to-God Excalibur sword and charged in where the REDs had come.

When Engineer spoke again it was so sharp and sudden that she jumped. “The hell you doin’ still here?” He sounded nothing like the Dell Conagher she had grown used to. There was something sparking in him, raring for blood. “Get damn well goin’!”

She got.

 

* * *

 

Two trips through respawn later, the unthinkable happened.

It was the RED soldier that did it. The Pyro had just walked out of their base’s front door, high alert with nerves buzzing from her last death, when a madcap scream split the air above her. She looked up just in time to dive out of the airborne bastard’s way before he landed with a crunch where she had been standing a second before.

She wasn’t looking where she was going. Her foot slipped. She fell into the canal.

She came up screaming and thrashing, blind with panic. Water. Water, oh, fucking hell no, God please, no, not, she had to get out, it was slipping into the seams of her suit she was going to drown she was going to sink drown lungs filling up with water no no no she—

—had to—

—her feet were on the ground. She was on the ground, the gloriously dry ground, breathing so hard she was certain she was going to start hyperventilating. Her mouth tasted uniformly like the brackish, filthy water.

It could have been five minutes or an hour before she stopped shaking. By the time she did most of the excess water had dripped from her suit. Shark lay next to her on the cement, shiny under the fluorescent lights.

Cement. Fluorescent lights. Where the hell was she?

The gentle slosh of more water caught her attention before anything else. She shot backwards, and her head hit the wall with a muted smack. Her muffled curse echoed in the tiny room. Squinting in the bright light, around her she saw walls of concrete, inset with humming machines she didn’t recognize. She was sitting on a sort of large, raised floor. Only a few feet and a handful of stair-steps away lay two gaping tunnel mouths, flooded with knee-deep water.

The Pyro stared at them, then twisted, looking for another exit. There wasn’t one. She was trapped.

In more ways than one.

A quiet splashing began to echo through the little room, from one of the tunnels, but she couldn’t tell which. Clambering upright, she seized her flamethrower, waited to see what was making the horrible sound.

When the RED spy strolled out of the tunnel, her heart stopped.

“You,” she said, unthinkingly. He was dead. Why wasn’t he dead?

The spy paused, looking at her. “Well,” he said at last in that rich accent, pulling out his revolver, “how inconvenient.”

He leveled it at her, and she scrambled out of the way almost too late; two reports echoed through the tiny room, and one clipped her suit. The spy’s eyes cut to her flamethrower as she squared it on him, and his eyebrows lifted. At the same time she noticed the blue briefcase in his other hand.

The spy shot at her again, and this time he got her in the shoulder. She yowled, losing her grip on the flamethrower. Another bang and a bullet tore into her hip. Her legs gave out and she fell to her knees. Hands shaking, she fumbled for her shotgun as the spy checked both tunnels behind him, and advanced on her. “I had wondered what would become of you, my volatile friend. That was for my suit, by the way.” He kicked her gun from her hands as she tried to find the trigger. “This is for the rake.”

With a neat, efficient movement, he blew out both her kneecaps. The Pyro’s vision went black.

It came back, seconds later, and through her blurring vision she could see him popping out the spent shells in the revolver. There was something else too, something small and blue off at the edge of the tunnel she could see down from where she lay—

“Yo ugly! Heads up!”

The spy whirled, and in the same instant the Pyro heard the distinct thunderclap of a bat hitting a ball. The spy’s head pitched backwards with an ugly, audible snap, and half a second later Scout had darted up, bat in hand. There was a wet, heavy smack as he swung into the RED, and another, and then the spy was laid out at her feet. The briefcase clattered to the ground. Scout whooped. “Yeah, take that asshole, that’s whatcha get!”

She hardly heard him. She was staring at the blood drooling from the unconscious spy’s mouth, trying to figure out if it was supposed to be boiling like that or not.

Her thoughts were disrupted by an ear-splitting boom as the Scout unloaded the meat of his scattergun into the spy’s back. The body jumped, and then was still. “Heh, you got no idea how good that feels,” Scout said, looking at her. He paused. “Oh, uhh, shit, he gotcha, huh. There’s uh, like, there’s some first-aid stuff ova’ there, you want I should . . . ?”

A long time passed. She wet her blistered lips, drawing in one more agonized breath. Then she picked up the shotgun and put it under her chin.

“Aw, Christ, come on!” was all she heard Scout say before she pulled the trigger. When she came back, right as the sirens were blaring the end of the day, everything after falling into the canal was a blank.

They got the briefcase back, she heard later, despite the RED spy killing over half their team on his own. Scout got on her case about blowing her brains out after he’d gone to the trouble of saving her from the selfsame man. Later she cornered the Engineer and made frantic gestures and noises until he got the gist of what she was saying.

“Scout said the fucking RED spy almost took the, the thing, you killed that guy, we fucking burned his fucking body—”

“I told you back then,” Engineer said, “wasn’t even sure what we burned was him.”

“But—but people don’t just, they don’t come back from the dead . . . ”

“Like as not he’s got some new gadget that lets him play dead like that, but I don’t know.” He watched her fidget for a moment, and all he wound up giving her was a shrug. “There’s things and happenings ‘round BLU and RED even I don’t quite understand.”


	19. Revelations

 

The Pyro scowled down at the table. Her gun was in pieces.

Before BLU she’d never realized weapons had to be cleaned. Maintained, okay, but cleaned? Even her flamethrower had to go through with it, and it _hurt_ , taking Shark apart. But Engineer had insisted, and sat down with her and her shotgun several times in the last week or so to show her how to unscrew the stock, the right way to slide out the firing pin. She was left on her own to figure the best way to clean the flamethrower.

So there she was at two in the afternoon on a Saturday, gloves off and fingers greasy with oil, trying to remember if she’d forgotten any part of the process. Yesterday she had forgotten which team she was on, in the middle of a fucking firefight, and it didn’t even occur to her to look down at her own suit for five minutes. She couldn’t trust herself anymore.

“Hey, Sparky! Catch!”

She looked up just in time to get socked in the chest with something small and solid. She squawked, scarcely grabbing it before it rolled down the gap between her and the table. Whatever it was, it was cold. The word _Schlitz_ was printed across it in bright, curving letters, and someone had taped a straw to it.

She looked up, and found the Scout leaning against the doorway. He was holding something just like what she had, and he was leaning on his bat. He never went anywhere without that thing.

Scout lifted an eyebrow at her. “You ain’t gonna tell me you’re some kinda beer snob are ya, c’mon, I know Schlitz ain’t the best shit in the world, I mean it’s godawful really but they don’t got the good stuff ‘round here cuz it’s freakin’ New Mexico, whaddya expect?”

She pulled off the straw. “Oh. Thanks.” What the hell was she supposed to do with this?

Her teammate pushed off the door frame and walked closer—no, not walked, swaggered. Scout didn’t know how to just plain walk, she’d figured that out pretty quick. He sat down next to her on the bench, easy as anything, and took a swig. Then he glanced over her dismantled shotgun. “Man, I keep puttin’ off doin’ my guns, Heavy’d tear me a new asshole if he knew. Soldier an’ Engie too probably, but it’s like, whatever, they come back without no blood on ‘em or nothin’ at respawn, they work just fine, ain’t like my life’s gonna be over if shit misfires or somethin’, heh, am I right?”

The Pyro had not even opened her mouth to try and get a word in edgewise. It was largely impossible.

And, Scout unnerved her.

Boston. That was the problem. He _was_ Boston, Boston made flesh, and simply being around him made her head ring with foggy, frayed memories that were locked behind frosted glass. They blurred together and it was like seeing the world from a carousel, all smeared colors and smells and sounds that never resolved themselves. A hardware store. Cracked pavement in summer. A lot with yellow grass. Why had she been in Boston? Why did it matter so much?

“You dead in there? I said, hey, don’t that filter come off none, I gotcha a straw for a reason.”

She jerked back to life, head lifting. The beer. Right. She popped the tab. That alone seemed to satisfy Scout, and he launched right back into his monologue as she tried to figure out if she actually could manipulate any of the mask’s filters open.

With some fiddling, she managed to crack one of them, a hinge she hadn’t known was there swinging slowly out. Cool air touched her face, and with it crept in the nausea of her secret, the paranoia. Every inch of mangled flesh suddenly ached and burned and throbbed. In a panic, she snapped it shut again.

Scout didn’t notice. “Anyway, yeah, hey, jus’ figured uh, I wasn’t bein’ the friendliest for a while there, don’t know you none, you an’ me we’re the newest ones here, right, I only started like maybe six months ago, gotta stick together, yeah? Ain’t nothin’ personal, had uh, just I got some bad history with . . . well it, it ain’t a big deal, it’s, it’s old news. Anyway, uh, just figured it’d be good, gettin’ you in as part of the team, I mean really in, cuz y’know, right, I’m kinda the team leader, see, keepin’ everyone together like, dunno where the hell they’d be without me. Runnin’ around with their shorts on their heads I figure.” She eased the filter back open, half an inch at most, and slipped the straw in. When she took a sip, she didn’t sputter it back out, but it was a near thing. Scout wasn’t kidding when he said it was godawful.

She noticed the room was quiet, and glanced back at her teammate. Scout had caught her opening the filter, was watching her intently. “So,” he said, “likin’ it here?” She nodded. “Oh hey, yeah, saw you beat the shit outta the other heavy today, holy hell, man, that was _awesome_ , where’d you get a freakin’ mailbox?”

Oh, right. The mailbox, all rusty ragged edges and sharp plastic. She shrugged, trying to choke down another mouthful of the swill she had been given. “It was just in the corner. Guess someone threw it over the fence.” Her voice made strange echoes on its way out of the mask.

Scout went still—kind of leaned forward as if trying to get a better look at her. She met his gaze, though he’d never be able to tell. “Yeah?” he prompted, after a weird pause. “He uh, yeah, he threw your ax into the water, right?”

The Pyro swallowed more beer to force down the rising bile in her throat. “Uh-huh.”

“Y’know he usually won’t follow you if y’jump in there? He’s too friggin’ fat, an’ his gun—”

“No,” she cut in sharply, shaking her head best she could with the straw in her filter. “No.” In the corner of her eye she could make out Scout giving her a Look _._

“Alright, sure,” he started up again, slow, “big suit an’ a flamethrower, ain’t great for water, yeah, I can see it.” He trailed off. “Right, yeah, anyway, the way you beat his stupid head in? Freakin’ beautiful. I wanna frame that memory an’ put it on my wall. Say, you got a light?”

Did _she_ have a light. That had to be a joke. (Was it a joke? Was she supposed to laugh?) She fished her Zippo out of the little ammo pouch on her suit’s belt, contemplated the weight of it for a moment.

“Campfire, got a minute?”

They both looked up. Engineer was leaning into the room, the tilt of his mouth something the Pyro recognized as his _something-is-wrong-here_ look. “Sup Engie,” Scout said.

“Howdy, Scout. Pyro—you mind comin’ with me a minute? Got . . . somethin’ you should see.”

Well. Okay. The Pyro set down the beer and snapped the filter shut. She was never opening that thing again.

“Hey so wait can I use that?” Scout asked, jabbing at her lighter with a finger. She looked at him, a cigarette already dangling from his mouth, and then down at the Zippo.

Her throat tightened. It was her lighter. _Her_ lighter.

But she was on a team, now, right? And Engineer had given it back. Scout was giving her an odd look now.

It took, probably, too long, but she dropped it into Scout’s outstretched palm.

 

* * *

 

“Well, what?” the Pyro said.

Engineer’s workshop at Teufort was—well, not unlike his workshop at home, his garage. Lots of concrete and scrap everywhere. There were more dismantled sentries and dispensers, and countless other things she couldn’t even begin to imagine uses for. From her seat on an upended, rusting wheelbarrow that was hosting a variety of large springs on its handles, she watched Engineer as he sort of puttered around, putting tools away, sorting metal heaps. Delaying, she realized after a time. That wasn’t like him.

“What?” she repeated, louder, and the Engineer slowly stopped wrapping a nest of wires into a neat ball. He straightened his back, and exhaled.

“Was wonderin’,” he said at last, dropping the wires into a drawer. “You ain’t been, say . . . seein’ things, have you?”

“Seeing things. What, apart from Klondike bars? Ghosts? Unicorns?”

“Hell, Pyro, I really can’t get a word you’re sayin.”

She shrugged. Too bad. The Engineer looked at her a while, then sighed and shook his head. “Just, yes or no?”

“... Yes.”

He’d put his chin in his hand, leaning against a workbench, studying her. “A lot, you’d say?” She shrugged. “I had wondered. Been gettin’ a little of that myself. Well, what I did was I talked to Medic about it. He’s the one pioneered that heal-beam stuff in the first place, gave me the tools to put it in my dispensers? And he ah. He don’t do things conventionally, as it were. His idea of a medical trial is t’drop a new chemical in the equipment and see what happens without tellin’ nobody.”

He shifted, and dragged something out from behind the workbench. It was bloodstained and dingy-looking, and a large “X” had been crossed on its front with red electrical tape. “Remember our buddy here?”

“The dispenser?”

“Right. The one I fixed you up with.” He hesitated. “Thing is I guess Medic did somethin’ to the output he gave me for this one. It don’t . . . it messes with the brain, is what I mean. Hallucinations, was his word. An’ memory loss, with prolonged exposure. Permanent.”

“ . . . Oh,” she said.

“Now I’m on Medic’s case about tryin’ to fix it, but he don’t . . . seem to think it’s reversible,” he said, shoving the box back behind the bench. “But maybe we’ll get lucky an’ it just . . . won’t be an issue for ya. Either way, I figured you oughta know.” He looked up at her, then, and even she could read the worry in the way he was chewing his lip. “And I wanted to apologize. For any harm I may’ve done you.”

When she said nothing, just got up and made her way over to look at the thing that had saved her life and likely given her brain damage in one swoop, Engineer stepped out of her way. He leaned back against the workbench, watching. The Pyro about jumped out of her skin when he lay a hand on her shoulder a few seconds later. Twisting her head around, she found herself face to face with his goggles.

“You let me know if things start gettin’ weird for you, all right?” Engineer said.

She hesitated. “Um. Sure.”

That was when the door slammed open. Engineer jumped. The Pyro did, too, twisting away from the dispenser to see what the noise was.

The noise was, in fact, Scout, knuckles white on the door handle. He was clutching something in his free hand, and didn’t move an inch when Engineer said, “Somethin’ you need, boy?”

Scout’s eyes jerked from the Pyro to the Engineer. His grip loosened, barely. “Just,” he started, “ . . . wanted to get the fire marshal here his lighter back.”

Her lighter. The Pyro eased forward, and held out her hand expectantly.

She wasn’t expecting the sharp, hollow stare that bore down on her when she looked Scout in the face, worlds different from the kid she had already grown used to. He shoved the lighter into her hand without a word and shouldered past her.

Bewildered, she peered back at him as he flung himself down on the wheelbarrow and pulled off the headset he always wore, passing it to Engineer and starting to drill him with questions about it.

Weird, she thought, and left.

 

* * *

 

The Pyro left, and Scout stopped talking. Literally stopped, cut himself off mid-sentence, jerked his head up like a gopher to stare at the door. Engineer had never seen him shut up so instantly.

Half a moment later Scout was on his feet again, pacing, rubbing his hands together like he didn’t know what to do with them. “Okay,” he started, “alright, okay, how much do you know about that guy?”

“What?”

“The freakin’ Pyro, you an’ him are always freakin’ pallin’ around, what, am I wrong?”

God, it always took him a second to adjust to his teammates talking about Pyro like she was a man. “Well—I guess so—”

“I gotta,” Scout started, and cut himself off again, running a hand through his hair. “Just. Look, Engie, have you seen him? Under the mask?”

“I have not.”

“ _Fuck_.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“Oh fer chrissakes don’t pull this with me hardhat, I ain’t fuckin’ kiddin’ here, just, I need to know if Pyro’s a girl or not, okay?”

“And I’m tellin’ you I don’t have a clue,” Engineer said, the lie coming easily. “That’s Pyro’s business. Anyway, don’t seem likely there’d be a whole lot of women in our line’a work, does it? Runnin’ around in a rubber mask and burning people to death with a home-made flamethrower? What’s even got you wonderin’ that?”

The Scout went very still.


	20. Fourth

The Soldier kicked open the door to the canteen at 8:14 AM, blasting a trumpet, badly. No one noticed. It was the seventh time in two days.

The Pyro had not looked at a calendar for as far back as her memory went. Admittedly, that was only about ten, eleven months. She was surprised she remembered the concept of one, either way. So when Soldier had begun belting out things like “O Say Can You See” and “The Star Spangled Banner” at all hours a week ago, she just assumed it was another one of his things and ignored it. Engineer assured her later that it was, in fact, just one of his things, but that the upped frequency meant it was almost the fourth. “The fourth what?” she’d said.

“Of July,” Engineer answered. He had gotten better at interpreting her. “Y’know, parades, fireworks, barbecues. America. Soldier’s favorite holiday.”

“Oh,” she said, trying to swallow down the bile that had jumped up her throat while he was talking. That had been happening more and more often, lately. “Right.”

But she was less concerned with Soldier’s celebrations than she was with the Scout, who was currently sitting as far away from her as was physically possible with the canteen’s cramped table.

When he thought she wasn’t looking, he would stare at her. For the last few days he’d been doing that, things like that, like he was studying her. He’d gotten quieter, too, enough that the rest of the team had been commenting on his lack of commentary.

But it had gotten worse the longer it went on. His gaze had evolved from the kind of stare she was used to, the “what the hell am I looking at here” one, to something sharper, and darker.

Today, it was outright poisonous.

Her thoughts were disrupted when Soldier slammed the bell of the trumpet down on the table. “HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, BOYS,” he roared, grinning. “Today is our nation’s day of victory! Today we rejoice in the birth of our glorious country!”

No one was listening, but the Pyro had learned very quickly that never deterred Soldier in his speeches. “Today,” he went on, grandly, “we celebrate!”

“Sure thing, mate,” Sniper said around a mouthful of toast, turning a page in his newspaper.

 

* * *

 

Late afternoon. The New Mexico sun was starting to sink down toward the horizon. The BLU team was milling around outside by Engineer’s truck and Sniper’s van, waiting for Soldier to finish his patriotic pre-celebration speeches. Most of the team, anyway. The Pyro was missing, and the Scout was leaning on the door frame of the main building with his arms folded, quiet and uncharacteristically pensive. Soldier had just begun urging everyone into the vehicles when Scout spoke up.

“I ain’t comin’.”

“What!” barked Soldier, stopping dead from where he was re-enacting Washington crossing the river on Engineer’s truck bed. He swiveled, fell over, and then scrambled back up to scowl at Scout from under his helmet. “Unacceptable behavior! Gross insubordination! You will get your skinny ass inside this truck, and you will—”

“Uh-huh,” Scout said, “no I ain’t.” That was all. He turned and went back inside the base.

From the driver’s side of his truck, where he had been picking through an ancient issue of _Automatons Monthly_ , Engineer watched as Soldier charged after the youngest member of the team, only to have Heavy catch him by the collar. “Scout ain’t comin’ along?” he asked the Spy, who was smoking impatiently next to him.

“It would seem so,” said Spy, dropping the butt of his cigarette to the ground and snuffing it out with his heel. “A blessing, really. This is going to be a trying enough ordeal without him as it stands.”

Well, that was Spy for you. Independence Day wasn’t much of a holiday if you weren’t American, after all. Engineer studied the struggling Soldier for a moment, then lay his magazine down on the hood of the truck. “Don’t seem like him, missin’ out on a shindig. I’m gonna go talk to him.”

“Grand,” Spy sighed, and lit another cigarette.

 

* * *

 

Scout was as predictable as any other young man who wanted to be alone. Engineer found him with a beer and a cigarette on the back porch, staring down at something in his hand. He looked downright . . . morose was the word that came to mind. On his life he had never seen Scout at anything like it.

“Hey,” he called through the cracked door. Scout jumped, fingers closing over what he held, and jerked around to glare at him.

“I _said_ I ain’t comin’!”

“Scout, you’re a grown man, I don’t care what you do,” Engineer said, pushing the door open. “Mind me joinin’ you?”

If looks could kill, Scout would have sent him to respawn in an instant. “Fine,” he said at last, “whatever, I don’t care, what do you even want?”

“Just thought I’d see if you wanted me to pick you up anythin’ in town.”

“Oh.” Scout’s shoulders slackened. He slipped whatever it was he was holding into his pocket, something metal by the sound of it. A length of beaded chain spilled out as he drew his hand away. He wasn’t wearing his dog tags, Engineer realized. “No I’m, I’m good, uh, thanks.”

Engineer stepped outside. Scout was a dark silhouette against the fading sky, the Badlands sun drenching everything in blacks and brilliants as it went down. “Sure? I was thinkin’ of gettin’ some of those little fireworks.”

“I don’t like fireworks,” Scout snapped, turning away.

“Huh. That so?” That might explain a few things. Scout was wound up, that was obvious, but he hadn’t been able to figure out why. “Scout,” he said after a while, “this got somethin’ to do with the holiday?”

“This, what’s ‘this’, there ain’t nothin’ an’ even if there was would it be any of your friggin’ business, hell no, screw off, old man, who even asked you.”

Well then. “All right,” said Engineer. “Just thought I’d ask. I’ll let you be.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“Don’t do anything you’ll regret tonight, hear?”

Scout snorted.

 

* * *

 

The Pyro had slunk away the moment Soldier announced he was taking everyone out drinking that night. She had been down to Teufort just once in her time on the team, and she hadn’t liked it then. It was hotter than the base, and loud, and by comparison to her new home, stuffed with people. Couldn’t imagine liking it any better on a holiday.

So when Soldier started rounding the team up to go, close to sundown, she circled around the buildings and climbed up the old watchtower she had seen Sniper disappear to sometimes. It was high enough she could see over all the shorter buildings, and even make out the shapes on the horizon that made up Teufort. The tower itself was simple enough, a ten by ten wooden platform with guard rails and a sliding trap door and a slanted roof, and she amused herself for a while by counting the rivets holding it together. Once, looking down, she saw the team trickling one by one out to Engineer’s and Sniper’s idling vehicles. As she watched something made Soldier leap off his perch on the truck and rush for the building, but Heavy stopped him, and she watched the two of them argue for a while before she got bored.

Her fingers itched. Out came the lighter, and by the time she looked up from it again, the trucks were gone, and the sun was setting. Soon it was dark, and little lights had buzzed to life all over the base. She blinked when one mounted on the roof of the tower hummed awake; it only lit up half of the platform, missing one bulb.

She had just been thinking about going back down and finding something else to do—investigating Medic’s infirmary while he was gone, maybe—when a sound like a gunshot rang out over the desert. In an instant she was on high alert, reaching for the weapons she hadn’t brought with her. Was RED attacking at night?

It came again, and then more, until it was ringing in her ears. She turned, and went perfectly still when she saw sky over Teufort.

Brilliant light painted the air in huge blooms of color, rising up with a far-off shriek to explode over the town. They came up in spirals and arcs, bursting in complex patterns, then cascaded back down to earth, disappearing as they went. Fire, she realized—fire _works_ , brilliantly twisted and formed into something new. Before she realized it she was leaning over the edge of the guard rail, her lighter pocketed and forgotten, trying to catch every new color and explosion.

She was transfixed.

They seemed to go on without end. She could have been there for five minutes or an hour when the trapdoor behind her squeaked open and banged shut again. The sound made her jump; hadn’t she been alone?

Tearing herself away, she turned, and found the Scout.

She almost didn’t recognize him. The weak yellow light above them drained the color out of him, darkening the circles under his eyes and highlighting the patches of his jawline he’d missed shaving. His mouth was a flat line, and his bat hung from one hand. The Pyro put her head to one side and waved, a little.

Scout didn’t say anything.

His eyes shot up past her shoulder as another round of rainbow fireworks thundered over Teufort. She turned to look, too, and as she did she saw the Scout move in the corner of her lens, hoisting his bat over his shoulder.

 

* * *

 

Scout swung, slamming his bat directly into the side of his teammate’s head.

The Pyro staggered sideways, thumping against the tower’s side. Stunned, it slumped against the corner, a thick, wet noise filtering out of the mask as it did. He swung into it again, hit it in the arm, thought he felt something crack, felt a vicious seething grin rip at his mouth and turn into a snarl instead. The Pyro hit the floor.

He wasn’t sure what he was doing, really. He had known a moment ago, but somewhere between the fireworks and the Pyro he had lost all rational thought, he was just motion now, barreling forward on inertia. The Pyro was stirring where it had fallen. He drove his foot into its side, once, twice, until it wailed.

“Hey,” he said, voice higher than he was used to hearing it, shriller. He dropped to one knee beside the freak, leaning into its face. “Hey, yo, buddy, let’s, let’s _talk_ , youse know how’ta talk, don’tcha?”

It didn’t answer, still and barely breathing. The blood was pounding in his ears, it was hard to even see straight, and before he knew it he was fumbling for its ammo pouch. He ripped it straight off its belt, snapped it open, and dumped it onto the boards at their feet without ceremony. A handful of matchbooks fell out, and some shotgun shells, and a small square of rusting metal.

The lighter.

Scout dropped the bat and snatched it up, focus diverted from the Pyro for the moment. It was cool to the touch, all the edges worn down smooth, and he rubbed his thumb over the engraving he had seen just days ago. (There were probably a thousand Zippos with Bible verses on them, he’d reasoned at first. It didn’t mean nothing. But Engineer’s words had wormed into his skull and stayed there, keeping him up at night, keeping him thinking in circles until he was sick and almost shaking and holy _God_ , what _if_  . . . ?)

In a jerky motion he lurched down closer to his teammate and wrapped his fist in its collar. “Where’d you get this?” he said, voice hoarse. “H, hey, you listenin’ to me, the _fuck_ did you get this?! Answer me. _Answer me!_ ”

It stared at him—or seemed like it was—then it shrugged.

Scout felt something snap in his head.

“You little _liar!”_ he snarled, slamming it backwards into the guard rail. The Pyro squalled, wrapping its gloved fingers around his forearms with all the strength of a gnat. “It, it was _you_ , wasn’t it, you fuckin’ stole it, didn’t you? Is that why you killed him? To, to get your hands on his fucking _lighter_?!” He didn’t even realize he’d slugged the fucking monster until he was shaking out his hand, knuckles bleeding from catching on the filters. The Pyro’s head snapped sideways, and as it turned back to look at him again he dimly became aware of the long, feral growl coming from its mask.

They stared at one another, motionless, while miles away the sky was set on fire.

Then, Scout said, “Okay. Okay, you wanna do this, sure, fine,” and let go of it long enough to drop the lighter into his pocket. He wrapped both hands around the filters of its mask, and pulled.

The Pyro screamed. It was a hideous, enraged sound, startling enough that he almost let go. He tightened his grip just in time to not lose his hold when it began thrashing, trying to get away. He hauled it upright, toward him and into the light, stronger and more determined by leagues.

White-knuckled, white-faced, he ripped the mask off of its head.

It staggered back when the mask pulled free, hitting the guardrail with a thump. Its fingers curled around the bar to steady itself, and he could hear it gulping air in huge, panicked pants.

Then, slowly, it raised its head.

Sprawled back against the edge of the tower was the woman he had seared into his memory a year ago. Even in the faint light the old lamp in the tower gave off, he could tell. Her hair had been cropped short, the shadows beneath her eyes gone practically pitch and a hideous network of scars devoured nearly half of her face, but it was the still the same face that had peered out at him from behind the door of that rundown house on the edge of town.

He’d spent a year wishing he’d just beat her head in then and there.

Scout’s skull throbbed. Something was rising up in him, something that scalded and shocked and drove him into blacker depths of rage than he had yet known. She opened her mouth and covered her face, started screaming at him, but all he could hear was his brother’s voice.

_She’s just somethin’ else, man, I dunno what it is, an’ between you an’ me I think she’s a little crazy but shit, I can’t stop thinkin’ about her. Gonna go down to her place tonight, maybe light us some fireworks, heh, know what I mean? Hey, don’t you guys go havin’ too much fun without me, got me?_

Yeah, Tobias, sure, whatever, get outta here, Scout had said. Go see your girl.

Go see your girl.

“You,” Scout said, and the floodgates opened.

He called her something that his ma would have slapped him for, lunging. “ _You_ , you _fucking monster_ , y, you—I’ll _kill_ you, I am going to _kill you do you hear me_ —”

“Scout,” she said, spitting out blood, “—Scout, d—”

He slammed her into the side of the tower so hard he felt it creak. “—snap your skinny neck, you fucking psychopath do you _remember me,_ did, did you—” His gun, why hadn’t he brought his _fucking_ gun? “—you shoulda run back to wherever the flying _fuck_ you disappeared to the minute you saw me, you really think you can just get off scott-fuckin’-free like that _you think you can run from_ **_me_** _?!”_

She brought her knee up hard into his gut, and when he keeled over she shoved him away and scrambled to the far corner of the tower. “Scout,” she snarled, “what the fuck, you piece of fucking shit, _what’re you talking about?”_

 

* * *

 

Scout told her.

He screamed a name at her like it was a bullet. It tore into her, tore her apart. That was how it started. The name settled in the base of her skull, dissolving and turning to acid that flooded through her. It spread like a fire, consuming every thought. It echoed through her bones and set her ears ringing.

The air was dead silent but for their ragged breathing, and then another booming wave of fireworks lit up the sky over Teufort. Her vision went fuzzy. She tried to step back, hit the guard rail, felt her breath catch in her throat.

When her eyes refocused, she was on her knees. She looked up, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from vomiting.

Someone was staring at her, someone tall and narrow and horribly real. Something in his eyes blazed like a solar flare. And his face—

—his face was exactly what she had seen in every mirror, over and over, for the last year. The blood and pus, the unhealing wounds, all of it. On impulse she lifted her hand to her cheek. Where she remembered raw flesh she found healed skin.

“Hey,” he said, his voice one she knew but wrong on a level she could not comprehend. There was another beneath it, higher, younger, going too quickly for her to understand. “Hey, firebug.”

Agony.

Images clipped before her eyes like bolts of lightning, and with them came sounds, smells. A towering inferno against the black sky. The boom of an orchestra beneath the raging flames and the scream of a thousand fireworks. The scent of burning hair and blood. A name, just out of reach, Scout had said it just seconds ago, how had she forgotten already—

She was shaking. Her chest hurt. She said something in a voice that splintered. He stepped toward her, and she scrambled to her feet.

“Been a long time,” he said through bleeding lips and shattered teeth.

“I, wait, please, I didn’t, I—”

“You what?” he barked, the voice beneath his growing louder. “You’re _sorry?_ You didn’t mean to? _Shut up._ ”

She didn’t see how he closed the gap between them; all she knew was that suddenly he was upon her, hands tight around her throat, his face inches from hers. As she stared, struggled, his wounds worsened, healed, disappeared, came back. “You left me like that,” he hissed, “You didn’t even try to save me. You didn’t even have the decency to _remember_ me.”

You were dead, she wanted to say. You were already dead. She couldn’t breathe. She was doing something with her hands, but she couldn’t tell what. Was she pulling at his fingers? Clawing at his face?

“Then you ran, didn’t you?” the ghost was saying. “You ran and set more fires, yeah, that’s right. Hockey stadiums, bus stops, car impounds? It wasn’t enough you killed me, you had to kill everything that even _reminded_ you of me!”

Something swelled up inside her, thrashing to the surface. It bubbled at the top for what felt like eons, then spilled out of her as a horrific cry.

For just a few seconds, everything was sharp and clear. Like broken glass.

It happened because of the chemsuit. It was crippling her. She put more into every movement just to get through the thick fabric. The Pyro kicked him and he stumbled, still latched onto her neck. She went down with him, and they landed in a riot of snarls and growls. Spittle hit her face as they grappled, fighting like dogs, kicking and howling. She drove her boot into his hip, kicked him off so hard he was thrown backwards.

She didn’t mean for him to step on his own bat as he staggered back. She didn’t mean for him to slip, slam square into the narrowest, rustiest part of the guardrail, or for the air to wrench with a grating crack as it snapped under his weight. She didn’t mean to sit there, staring, as his inertia carried him right over the edge.

The Pyro leapt to her feet, staggering to the side of the tower. Her thoughts had turned to radio static, getting denser and louder as she looked over the side to see Scout getting smaller and smaller.

She blinked, and it was the ghost, looking up at her in betrayal and shock. She blinked again and it was Scout, shrieking curses even as he hurtled down well over a hundred feet.

Then his screams were very suddenly silenced.

 

* * *

 

Scout’s body was gone by the time she got down the ladder. When her feet touched the earth, she collapsed, shaking.

The mask fell into her lap. The Pyro stared at it, deaf and dumb, having no memory of bringing it down with her. Why wasn’t she wearing it? What if someone saw—?

Her eyes flicked up and saw the still-wet bloodstain on the gravel and dirt. Oh, she thought, and touched where the wounds on her face had been for so long. Pain snapped at her, she felt warm, wet blood, but her hand came away dry and clean. She looked at the wet dirt again, and something else caught her eye: a glint of tarnished metal.

Still too weak to stand, she crawled. The thing lying in the muddying earth was silver, two little pieces of metal on a snapped chain. Scout’s dog tags, she realized as she picked them up. Respawn hadn’t caught it. She pocketed it without thinking.

Slowly, she pulled the mask back over her head and got up. She pointed herself at the BLU living quarters, and began walking.

The rust and fog on her brain seemed to shake off with every step. Clips of her life before . . . before everything played through her mind like a jittery slide-show, mismatched with sounds and voices. Her kiln, her house. A soft, constant prattle in a voice she barely remembered as they walked through dark scrub land past midnight with the bright glow of her brand-new flamethrower leading the way. The memories burned into her as brightly as the sun. They were blinding.

Before she knew it she was trudging through the base again, with no recollection of the trip there. She stood now in the doorway of the common area, swaying on her feet. Her palms itched, she ached, desperately. She needed to burn something, she _needed_ to. Maybe she could just  . . . light the whole base up.

She reached for her lighter. It wasn’t there.

It wasn’t her lighter.

It felt like she stood there for a long time, after that thought came to her.

One way or another she found herself slumped onto the couch, weak and useless. But eventually she saw movement on the peripheral of her lenses, and jerked upright to look.

There was Scout, hanging by the door and watching her. Just watching.

Neither of them said anything, and she couldn’t tell, between blinks, how much of who she was looking at was Scout and how much was the ghost, for the ghost was certainly there now: a solid six inches taller than Scout himself, still dressed in that red varsity jacket. There was a gaping hole torn through the breast. Finally he ... or they ... pushed off of the door frame and stepped toward her. As they moved she saw the light glint off the Zippo in their hand.

“Scout,” she said, and for a moment, it was, indeed, just Scout.

He didn’t let her get further than that. “Why’d I just wake up in respawn?”

“ . . . What?”

He sneered. “Don’t screw with me, Pyro. What killed me? You push me off the tower?”

She stared. “You don’t—remember.”

“Look, mush-mouth, I don’t have a freakin’ clue what you’re sayin’ so either speak up or take that stupid thing off your stupid face.”

Relief swept through her. He didn’t remember. Maybe—maybe she could push all of this out of her mind, forget it had ever happened, maybe she could go back to blissful ignorance.

She looked at his face again. The same disfigured horror she had seen in the mirror for months looked back.

The Pyro pulled her gaze away, forcing down the burst of nausea filling her throat, and reluctantly popped the mask’s filter with a shaking hand. “You . . . came up to talk to me about something in the tower.”

“Yeah, yeah, I knew all that, and?”

“I guess . . . there was a weak spot on the guard rail. You were leaning against it and it just . . . it snapped.”

When she glanced up at him again his face was back to normal. Now he was just scowling down at her, eyes narrowed. His fingers tightened around the lighter.

For a split second she was convinced he was going to attack her again. The muscles of his arms and neck had wound up into terse coils. She thought she saw something moving among them, under his skin—blood was running out of his eyes and his ears and nose and mouth, soaking into his shirt, he was awash with it, she felt so dizzy, she couldn’t do this, she couldn’t.

She was about to abandon all hope and lunge at him when from outside the common room came footsteps. They both turned to look, and found Sniper watching them. He was alone, leaning against the doorway, his signature _#1 Sniper_ mug in hand. He looked first from Scout to her, and then back. “M’I interrupting something?”

The room was so quiet that the Pyro could hear the fireworks, still going off miles away. A few seconds more and Scout turned on his heel, knuckles white around the lighter. “Guess not,” he muttered, and shouldered past Sniper.

Dazed, the Pyro quietly snapped her filter closed and looked at Sniper. He met her gaze, or approximated it, and glanced after where Scout had gone. Then he left, too, and after his footsteps faded it became utterly silent. He must have come back on his own.

Later, she wouldn’t remember dragging herself back to her room. She wouldn’t remember the obsessive examination of her face in the streaky reflection of her window, or the way the unhealing wounds that part of her still swore were real would waver and move.

What the Pyro would remember, after she stripped off the suit and buried herself in the sheets, was the nightmares; the shrieking fire that for the first time in her life scared instead of comforted her, the howl of fireworks against a far-off orchestra, and the nameless ghost that hunted and mocked and chased her until she could run no more.


	21. Retribution

 

The sun rose.

The Pyro awoke, still exhausted. Bleary-eyed, she pushed herself upright with a groan and sat blinking for a moment.

When she looked up, she saw the man standing in the corner of the room, watching her.

It didn’t register that she had grabbed the bedside lamp and flung it at him until it was already sailing through the air. Her aim was horrible; the lamp crashed into the wall beside him and shattered into a thousand pieces. The man didn’t even blink. He did, though, flash her a hockey-player-gapped grin. “Morning to you too, firebug.”

The Pyro could feel the bile crawling up her throat, and she forced it down. It hurt. Everything hurt, all at once. Very slowly, she locked eyes with him, and wondered why she wasn’t surprised to see him. He was tall and gangly-limbed, wearing a charred red letterman jacket. Two dog tags hung on a chain around his neck. There was hardly an inch of his skin that wasn’t black or vicious red with burns. “You,” she said, her voice raw.

“Me,” he agreed.

This was impossible. She knew that, somewhere, under the rising buzz in her head. Hadn’t Engineer said this might happen? Hall . . . halluc . . . whatever the word was, she couldn’t remember, she couldn’t fucking remember.

Engineer. She should talk to Engineer. With shaky movements she climbed out of bed, afraid to look away. He was getting closer, larger, until he was leaning over her despite not having walked at all. “Aw, what, you gonna go run to Engie?” he said, words seeping mockery as he read her mind. “You gonna tell him you’re seein’ ghosts? Friggin’ stupid, sheesh, how you gonna explain this one? He already thinks you’re a freakin’ psycho. ‘Hi Engineer, you know what, turns out I killed Scout’s brother last year and forgot all about it until yesterday!’ Wow, great idea.”

The Pyro tore her eyes away. She tried to ignore him, kicking off her nightclothes and pulling on the chemsuit. An unfamiliar jingle in her ammo pouch distracted her, and she opened it to find Scout’s dog tags amid her collection of matchbooks and shells, still bloodstained. She picked them up without thinking, glanced back up at the ghost—hadn’t he been wearing these a moment ago? They were gone now. “Hey, y’found my tags! Too bad you had to murder my little brother to get ‘em, huh?”

She shoved them back into her pouch and snapped it shut, then pulled on the mask and looked at him. He leered at her. “Yeah I’m still here, doll, you ain’t gettin’ rid of me again.”

He followed her out of her room, a constant stream of acidic words and insults, to the canteen, where only Heavy and Soldier were to be found. Neither one of them paid her or her ghost any attention as she raided the fridge, making more noise than strictly necessary. She even started whistling to herself, trying to drown out the words that never got any louder but still cut right through to her brain.

It felt like she did that for ages. She hadn’t realized her whistling had been increasing in volume until she looked up and both of her teammates were staring at her. The ghost was gone. Heavy raised an eyebrow. “Is happy day for Pyro?”

Ha. Hahaha.

An hour later she was out front of the base, trying to distract herself by playing target practice with her flare gun and RED’s windows. When she saw motion in the corner of her eye she didn’t turn at once, hoping—hell, praying, even—

“So you remember my name yet?”

The Pyro went dead still halfway into reloading her flare gun, frozen by the gush of nausea flooding her gut. Seconds, or years, passed, and she finished slotting in the new round. “You’re not real,” she said.

The ghost laughed, hopping off his perch on a metal drum in the shadows. “You’re talkin’ to me, ain’tcha? Hell, since when was you any good for figuring out what’s real and what ain’t anyway?”

“Engineer—”

“Oh, shut up,” he said. He was circling her, and she turned with him to keep her back safe, sick and uneasy. Black blood oozed from his mouth, and the charred skin on his cheeks wrinkled unpleasantly as he spoke. “What does he knew about you, really? Jack shit, that’s what, he shoulda shot you the minute he found you, hell, he woulda if he’d known what kinda monster you really are.”

“What do you want me to do?” she snapped, flinging her gun at him. It bounced off the dirt and skittered off the edge, into the water, but even that didn’t seem important now. “You were already dead, what was I supposed to do? You were dead and my whole yard was on fire, I—I didn’t know what to do, I was scared—”

“Scared,” he repeated. “So that’s why you just sat and watched me _burn_?” She hesitated. He sneered. “You’re a fucking voyeur.”

The Pyro opened her mouth to object, deny it, but found no words at all.

Seconds passed as they stared at one another. She looked away first.

Someone was standing in the doorway, watching her. She jumped backwards, the ghost still leering at her from the edge of her vision, to find the Spy. He held a smoking cigarette between his fingers, and lifted one eyebrow when she looked at him. “ _What_?” she said.

“Nothing, nothing,” the Spy demurred. “Though, do you often engage in shouting matches with thin air?”

“Yeah, moron, you don’t even got a clue’a what you freakin’ look like do ya? Cripes, you’re lucky Soldier’s here bein’ nuttier than you.”

She flipped them both the bird, then stormed back inside. The ghost tagged along behind her, still, always, hissing jabs and accusations.

She could not shut him out, try as she might, for the rest of the day, and the day after that, and the day after that. He flickered in and out of her senses with all the consistency of lightning, here one moment, there the next, but never gone. He was this hideous caustic venom dripping steadily through her brain at all hours, keeping her awake, haunting her, and he brought friends.

Three days had passed since Scout and the tower. When she woke that morning and found herself alone, she had a flicker of hope that it might be over. When the ghost did not appear all that day the flicker became a flame. On the field she was spectacular: she brought down a RED sentry gun on her own with a lucky compression blast from Shark that sent the rockets whipping back around to where they had come, and got her revenge on their spy in his own base. He had died pitifully, flung into the corner and hacked to pieces with her ax. The barbed wire she had pulled off the fence and wrapped around the head worked even better than she had expected.

Now the only thing making her want to be sick was the blood loss from her fight with the enemy demoman a moment ago, and the water sloshing gently at her ankles. He had forced her down into the sewers, and she hadn’t even noticed until her fires were extinguished as he splashed in, charred and unrecognizable. Now she looked down at the water that she could not feel through the thick rubber of her boots. It was okay, she thought, tentatively. It was just water. It was hardly any water at all.

She had started to head down the tunnel for the first-aid kit stowed at its end and the demoman’s body reared up out of the water before her. She reeled back with a sharp cry, smacking her head straight into one of the pipes coming out of the walls.

When her vision cleared, what stood before her was not the demoman but someone else, someone she had both forgotten about and still recognized instantly. He was tall and soaked to the bone, face bloated and pale, streaming water from his mouth and nose and ears.

_(There was a horrible squeal of tires as the car sailed off the bridge, an awful crash when it slammed into the swollen river. Noise. Fear. Shouting as the water poured in between her teeth. Her mother unconscious, her father panicking. Her brother, the last thing she saw, shoving her out of the window.)_

His head tilted sharply to one side, a smile creeping too widely across his deformed features. The Pyro watched in abject horror as he reached into his own mouth and twisted out a tooth. He held it out to her and it became a lollipop, bright peppermint swirls of white and bloody red, and that was when she turned tail and bolted for the stairs. She didn’t stop until she ran smack into their own Scout in the courtyard, nearly falling flat on her ass doing it. Scout didn’t say anything. He hadn’t spoken to her since they were interrupted by Sniper that night. He just looked at her like she was shit on his shoe, and shoved her into the wall as he passed.

She hid in her room after the whistle blew, though nothing else appear to terrorize her. That evening she stumbled out into the canteen two hours late for dinner, starving and worn to nothing, and found the now-familiar sight of Sniper’s hat peeking over the top of his newspaper. She hadn’t paid it much mind until the paper rustled with the twitch of his fingers and he lowered it to peer out at her. She glanced over in spite of herself, aching for a friendly word. The Sniper was always friendly. It was part of being a professional, he said.

At first all she noticed that was out of place was that his aviators were missing, and his hat had disappeared since she last looked, too. It took a few seconds of concentrated staring for her to recognize the businessman and his red tie from so long ago, his casual smile replaced by pulverized flesh and old, thick blood. The smell of diesel hit her like, well, a bus.

The next thing she knew was gagging into the toilet, with the ghost leaning on the stall wall and saying, “Oh, what, _now_ you’re upset?”

But it wasn’t until Engineer found her under the kitchen table at four in the morning two days later that she quite realized how bad it had become. He was in his pajamas, carrying blueprints and pencils. For her part she was knotted into as tight a ball as her suit would allow, face pressed to her knees and both arms over her head as she cowered against a table leg. Seconds ago the ghost had been describing to her, in detail, exactly what being gored through the heart and burning to death was like. So when Engineer said, “Pyro? That you?”—

_“Shut the fuck up already!”_

The Pyro did not hear him slowly put his things on the table, nor notice when he crouched down to her level, eyebrows quirked. He cleared his throat. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

She wanted to throw something at him, attack him, and then realized she didn’t know why. This was Engineer. This was Engineer and the ghost was nowhere in sight. She gave a great, shuddering sigh, and took his extended hand.

He asked her something as he helped her to stand, but she was too busy trying not to collapse to hear it. He had to repeat it twice before the Pyro fully understood. “When’s the last time you ate?”

“Uh.” Meals. Food. Right. She tried to think. It was like breathing mud. A wash of dizziness swept over her, and she wound up shrugging for lack of a better answer. Engineer’s mouth twisted into a pensive frown. “Just, I haven’t seen you at meals none for the last couple days. Ain’t you hungry?”

Time was passing strangely. She must have said something, because when she could pay attention to reality again Engineer was rummaging in the fridge. “Here,” he said, now suddenly back at the table and putting something in front of her, “these’re from tonight. Some kinda Russian thing, I guess, Heavy’s recipe. Ain’t bad. Try it.”

When she looked at it, pushing through the static that was her constant companion now, she saw bloody teeth and bright lollipops swimming in ash. She made a sick sound, turning her head aside, but when she glanced at it again it seemed—normal. Cabbage, beef. Across from her she heard Engineer sigh. “C’mon, Pyro, you got to eat.”

On cue, her stomach snarled. She winced. Then she looked back up at Engineer (that wasn’t his name, didn’t he have another name? Hadn’t she known it once?), exhaled slowly, and reached up to pull off the mask. Why not? It was Engineer, after all, and anyway her . . . “secret” didn’t really matter any more, did it.

It didn’t seem like anything did.

Without the mask the air seemed too cold and too sharp as she breathed in. Engineer was staring. The ghost was sitting next to him. ( _“Haha, shit, babe, you ain’t lookin’ too good.”_ ) She ignored them—tried to—and prodded at the food with the fork that had at some point appeared in her hand. The Engineer averted his eyes, silent. She had managed to choke down a whole two bites when he said, “Didn’t ever think I’d see you take that off.”

She snorted. “Lucky you.”

He glanced at her, at her face. For a few seconds he searched her like that, like he was trying to understand. “It ain’t that bad, y’know,” he said, finally, as she tried to keep eating. “Nothin’ worse than Demo’s eye.”

The third bite was like a mouthful of sulfur. She gagged, barely swallowed it, and dropped the fork. “Engineer,” she said hoarsely, “shut up. Just, just shut up, I don’t . . . I don’t want your opinion of how disfigured I am. I don’t care.”

“All right,” he said. “Sorry. But you got to tell me what you were doin’ under this table.”

“I ‘got’ to do jack shit.”

Engineer looked tired. “S’pose not. But you did say you’d tell me if things started gettin’ funny for you.” He rapped his knuckles on the table, and the echo it made hurt her ears. “Hidin’ under tables in the middle of the night? Hell, takin’ off that mask in front’a me? I call that odd.”

The ghost was sitting next to her, now. “Go on,” he said, so close she could have bitten him. “Tell him. Tell him _everything_. We can take bets on how long before my brother finds out.”

Engineer said, “Pyro?”

The Pyro swallowed, sick and suddenly starving. “Why are you even awake?” she said, picking up the fork again.

Her teammate made a quiet, exasperated sort of sound. He answered anyway. “Can’t sleep, is all. Ideas, plans, that sort of thing. How’s, uh. How’s your flamethrower holding up?”

“I broke it over their sniper’s head today.” She hadn’t known it was the RED sniper. The ghost had taken his place. Afterwards he had laughed about how she just couldn’t kill him, could she? Not since that first time. “Snapped right in two.”

“Respawn fix it?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded, some, distracted. The Pyro forced down another four bites before he spoke again. “Look, Smoky. You got me worryin’. Let me help you.”

Her pulse was throbbing in her ears. Engineer wouldn’t stop looking at her like she was pathetic and helpless—was that how he saw her? As something to be pitied? She didn’t want his pity, _or_ his help, and she had opened her mouth to tell him as much when he added, “Please.”

There was something in his voice that struck her, hard. This was Engineer. This was the man who had taken her in, helped her, when the sane thing to do would’ve been to put her out of her misery. “Help me?” she echoed, the fight gone out of her.

She looked back at Engineer and flinched. The ghost had swallowed him up. He smiled at her, dripping blood on the table. _Yeah_ , he said. _Like help is something you deserve._

The final tenuous thread of calm she had been trying so hard to hold onto snapped. _“Shut up!”_ she bawled, clapping her hands over her ears. “Shut up, shut _up_ —”

“Whoa now,” Engineer was saying, and he was Engineer again, all soft Texas drawl and the smell of machine oil. He was already up and at her side. “Hey, c’mon, calm down—”

“Don’t _fucking_ touch me, leave me alone, why won’t you just, just—”

The chair caught her feet as she tried to flee, and there was a hideous crack as she tripped right into the wall. Her vision fuzzed out, then sharpened. Engineer was staring at her. The way he was watching her—alarmed and bewildered—made her want to vomit.

Before he could get a word out she had forced herself back to her feet, shaking legs be fucked. She grabbed her mask from where it had fallen and shoved past him. “Pyro, wait,” he said, but he did not follow her.

The Pyro stopped in the doorway, choking down her panicked breathing. Her heart was thundering in her chest, threatening to snap her very ribs. Her hands trembled. Her head pounded. She inhaled deep and slow, staring out into the hall. The ghost stood at the end of it, waiting for her.

“Thanks for the food,” she said, and pulled the mask back over her head.


	22. Abyss

 

The dog tags were dark with stuck-on ash in the embossed spaces, scorched on the edges. They wouldn’t lighten no matter how much she rubbed at them, but she didn’t stop trying for an hour. When the ghost started laughing at her, she gave up and just stared at them instead.

There were letters on the metal. She knew they were letters, but they may as well have belonged to another alphabet. She couldn’t read them anymore. Sometimes she could pick out their individual shapes, if she looked long enough. T, she had gotten that far, and an O . . . then her mind would fail her.

It was the same everywhere else. All of the words in the books Engineer had given her seemed to smear together into swampy blurs of ink, and even the simple signs directing movement around the base were indecipherable jumbles of color now.

The Pyro tossed the tags onto the bed, next to her ax and flamethrower, and slumped down onto the mattress, heavy with exhaustion. Sleep had not visited her for the last two days, and now the team was paying for it; she spent more time cycling through respawn than fighting now, and her latest adventure in guilt-induced hallucination had left her cowering before another false corpse while the RED spy escaped with the intelligence.

Next to her, the ghost was fiddling with the tags. (He wasn’t. If she tried, if she really tried, she could still see them where she had dropped them on the blankets, fuzzy and indistinct.) “Ever think about how much you probably fucked him up?” he said. “My brother?”

She opened her mouth, and shut it again immediately. Her will was weakening. She had tried so hard not to respond to the ghost, ever since her outburst in the kitchen, but she was breaking. She was so tired. It had been sixteen hours since she had been coaxed into eating. And he just wouldn’t stop talking.

The Pyro wet her lips, staring straight ahead.

“Ferreal, though,” the ghost said. “Remember what he looked like when you saw him last year? Yeah you do. Straight up thought he was, what, like eighteen? _Maybe_ twenty? Just a kid, doll. Now he kills people for a livin’.”

Scout on her doorstep, his bat over his shoulder, looking at her like he wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. Scout crowing in victory as he gunned the RED spy down. Scout bent over her in the half-dark, eyes alight with hate and fury as he wrapped his fingers around her neck.

She couldn’t help herself. “The first time I saw him he was hitting baseballs into a mob,” she said, her voice a pathetic croak. “And, and _you_ were—”

“Shut up,” he said. She withered under the command and hated herself for it. “Big fuckin’ difference between that and beating a guy to death with a bat. Anyway, what I meant was these.” The dog tags clattered in her ear as he shook them at her—they were on the bed, _she could see them on the bed_ — ”He’s wearing my dog tags, firebug. I got seven brothers an’ outta all of them he’s the one got my tags. What’s that say to you?”

Without another word she seized the tags from the bed, her glove passing through the ghost’s knee as she did. It was so hard to think. All she could come up with was that the tags belonged to Scout, and she needed to give them back. Maybe that would fix something.

“You ain’t serious,” sneered the ghost as she got up, winding the chain through her fingers. She pocketed it, and as an afterthought, threaded her ax through her belt, too. “There ain’t nothin’ you can do about this. You ain’t gonna get forgiveness.”

The Pyro said, “I know that,” and left.

 

* * *

 

She didn’t know what she was doing. God, why had she ever thought this was a good idea?

It was well past dinner. Down the hallways, the Pyro could just hear the rest of the team now and then, passing the evening in whatever ways they would. But she was at the barracks, and the barracks were empty, except for Scout. He was sprawled back on his bed when she got there, the low buzz of a radio on the ground his only company. “He ain’t been much for socializin’ lately,” Engineer had said when she asked him where he was a few minutes ago. “Don’t quite know why.”

The ghost was nowhere in sight, and that at least was a small blessing in light of what she was about to do. Hell, she didn’t even know why she was doing it. It wasn’t like the rest of the team wouldn’t recognize Scout’s tags if she just left them out somewhere.

But here she was, anyway, lurking in the doorway.

She edged inside, footsteps heavy. Scout’s bunk was second-closest to the door, its frame drowning in magazine tear-outs of baseball players and pinup girls. He noticed her almost at once (how could he not), and sat up. Frankly she hadn’t realized it was possible for someone to sit up menacingly, but apparently, you could. “The hell is it, mumbles?”

She could have sworn she had thought of something to say before she got here. Instead she just stood there, picking at the edge of one of the posters. Scout himself sat on the mattress, hunched over with his elbows on his knees and glaring at her. “Hey, sorry, did I stutter? You don’t got no business bein’ here, you got your own friggin’ room, so whaddya want? Didja come to freakin’ stare at me or what, spit it out, I ain’t got time to waste on freaks like you.”

“Um,” she started, hand sinking slowly to her ammo pouch. Her ammo pouch where she no longer kept a lighter. All her gloved fingers found were the snapped length of chain. “Your, uh—I found—”

“Look, dumbass,” he said, getting up. He jabbed a finger into her chest, lip curling. “I ain’t even gonna talk t’you if I can’t friggin’ understand you, alright, you can just march on outta here—”

She ignored him. “I . . . I found these,” she said, digging the tags out and holding them out to him. Scout stopped short. How long had it been since the tower? A week? Two? “They’re yours. Right?”

At first Scout didn’t say anything. His eyes locked on the tarnished metal hanging from her hand, darted up to her face, then down again. His jaw set. “Haha, _hoo_ boy,” the ghost said, suddenly there and leaning on Scout’s shoulder, even as she watched Scout’s mouth twist into a sneer, “oh, man, you went an’ whiffed it this time, doll, you—”

Scout ripped them out of her hand, knuckles going white he clenched them so hard, and the Pyro flinched when his other hand shot out to fist in her collar. “You the one took these off me?” he growled. The ghost was still over his shoulder, grinning now, like this was the funniest joke in the world. “These tags is _mine_ , got it, you don’t _ever_ touch these—you _creep_ , I oughta teach you a lesson right now is what I oughta do—”

“Scout—”

She heard the break more than felt it when his fist connected with her cheekbone. Her head jerked sideways and she was half-limp in his grip until he did it again. Her teeth cracked down on her tongue and blazing needles of pain shot through her entire face with the second blow. A high, pained keen escaped her, and Scout let go to shove her backwards. She staggered and hit the opposite bunk, hunching over.

“Funny thing, y’know,” he said, drawing nearer, and the Pyro couldn’t tell if it was the ghost or Scout speaking now. “Found somethin’a yours too, found that lighter of yours on me the other night, that real wrecked Zippo? Bet you been missin’ that, huh? Ain’t that a shame? You ain’t gettin’ it back, cuz y’know somehow I don’t think it was even yours to start with, was it, _bitch_? Whaddya think, am I wrong here?”

The bunk clanged behind her as she tried to get away, groping for her ax. Scout, or the ghost, sneered. “Oh, what, you gonna kill me? Just like before? That’s how you fuckin’ deal with your problems, right, murderin’ ‘em?”

He went at her again, but it was sloppy, angry. This time she managed to catch his fist. In the same movement she ripped out her ax and barreled forward, the ghost howling in her ear even as she threw both herself and her teammate to the ground. She was a psychopath, he said, a psychopath and a murderer and beyond all redemption and she didn’t even care, she had never cared, did she, _did she?_

She didn’t know anymore.

There was a wet crunch as she landed on top of him. Scout grunted, once, and went still.

All at once everything was quiet, except the radio still humming softly by Scout’s bed. Tears were crowding her eyes as she gazed down at Scout. There was a lot of red everywhere, suddenly, on Scout and her suit and the floor. She pushed herself upright. Where had her ax had gone?

Some of the red had gotten smeared on one of her lenses, somehow. She lifted a hand to wipe it away, but before she could, the glint of something silver tangled up in her fingers caught her eye. She had ripped the dog tags back out of Scout’s hand.

This had turned out fantastic for her, hadn’t it. She turned the tags over in her hand, and froze. Amidst the blur of indecipherable letters and numbers a single word stood clearly. A name.

**TOBIAS**.

The tags clattered as they hit the ground. A disappointed _tsk-tsk_ above her made her gasp and she looked up. The ghost—Tobias— _Tobias_ was standing over her, and he was so impossibly tall and present. He took up the whole world. “What’s that make?” he asked. “Three? Three times you’ve killed someone in my family?”

She looked down at Scout, and wondered how on earth she had missed the fact her ax was lodged deep in his neck. He stared dead-eyed up at the ceiling, mouth half-open and drooling blood. “You goin’ for a record?” Tobias said.

“Shut up,” she mumbled, pulling out the ax. God, she’d just killed someone in the barracks. She’d just half-beheaded Scout in his own sleeping quarters. She—she needed to leave. She needed to—

“You fuckin’ think that’s it?” said Scout.

The Pyro jumped, heart in her throat. The body still lay flat beneath her, unmoving, but his eyes had gone from glassy and empty to fixed determinedly on her. He was still alive. How was he still alive? His shirt looked more purple than blue, she could see the white of his spine through the wound, how—how . . .

“Hell, look at this fuckin’ big-shot, comes an’ jumps me in my own _room_ , ain’t got no weapon, just boom, here, let me _kill you again!”_

Despite herself she looked to Tobias, as if he would help her. He stood with his hands in his pockets, half-slouched, giving her the sadistic look she had no memory of seeing him wear when he was alive. “What? Don’t look at me, moron, I ain’t the one talkin’ to ya.”

“C’mon, fuckwit, you ain’t done with me yet,” Scout said. The Pyro stared down at him, head spinning. He couldn’t be alive. Not after that. “You won’t never be done with me, this, you hear me, you can’t keep runnin’ from what you did, you ain’t ever gonna escape this shit—”

_“Shut up!”_

In a blind rage she brought the ax down again. It bit deep into his chest, down through the ribcage, but it did not stop him. He kept carrying on, mocking and deriding her, and now Tobias was laughing and laughing at her and soon that was all Scout was doing too, and every part of her surged with new agony every time she moved, and she pulled the ax out and swung it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again . . .

It split through the middle of Scout’s face and stuck there, caught on his jawbone. Try as she might she could not free it, not with her burning arms and aching back and the way her face still screamed in pain. She gave up and slouched back, half-sobbing, and stayed like that for what must have been a century until she realized she was alone.

The corpse beneath her was gone. All that remained was a vast pool of blood and more blood. Everything was silent, even the radio. Somehow this was worse.

The Pyro forced herself up, numb and heavy. Her ax was free now. Clumsily she slid it back into its place on her belt. Blood ran down her suit in tiny rivulets to drip to the ground. She swallowed and tasted copper.

Senseless, she staggered out of the barracks.

 

* * *

 

Medic’s infirmary was always locked when he was not there. The Pyro wasn’t sure how she opened it, just that when she had arrived there the hospital-green double doors had been shut, and a moment later she was inside. A snapped chain and padlock lay on the ground, and her shoulder hurt.

Her face hurt, too. More than hurt. The adrenaline had begun to wear off, and now every move she made sent horrific pain through her cracked cheekbone. She had given up trying to hold back the tears it forced to her eyes. On the field she’d been subject to more horrific injury than she had ever imagined, but it was almost always followed by the blackness of death or the ozone-hum of a medigun beam. Even Engineer’s sentry back in his garage had the courtesy to leave her unconscious. She could only remember one other time she had ever had to cope with this much pain for this long, and that had been the worst thing that had ever happened to her, maybe. She could not bear it again. She needed Medic, Engineer even, anyone, but she was soaked in her teammate’s blood. There was no one she could turn to.

Blood trailed her still as she wandered through the infirmary, not sure what she was looking for. A medigun? No—they were bound to Medic’s . . . only Medic could activate them for some reason, so the other team couldn’t use them. ( _Bi-o-met-tric, Engineer said. S’Aussie technology._ ) Even if she found one it would be useless to her. First-aid, then, pills, something, God, anything to make the pain stop.

Cabinets. The infirmary was lined with cabinets, tall things that looked like the resupply lockers in respawn. She flung one open to be greeted with shelf upon shelf of bottles and boxes, vast quantities of them, with folders and files stuffed in between. She wouldn’t be able to find anything in here, she realized, but she seized up one at random anyway and peered at the label.

It was a smear of indecipherable gibberish. She didn’t know what she had expected. With a broken snarl she put it back, and looked at another, and another, remembering the dog tag, desperate for lightning to strike twice.

Nothing.

She sank down to the ground, trying to steady her breathing. Think. Think . . .

Respawn. What if she just sent herself to respawn? She didn’t think she had the strength left to do it with the ax and the weapons room was too far away, but surely there was something in here she could use. She might be able to forget what she’d done, in the bargain.

Maddeningly slow, she circled the infirmary. In the silence she could hear things she couldn’t place above, soft coos and rustling in the darkness. She thought nothing of it until a whirr of wings and a flash of white crossed her senses, and she had to choke back a wail. When she pulled herself back together she found it was just one of Medic’s doves. It had come down from its roost to look at her, perching on something she hadn’t noticed before—one of Engineer’s dispensers. That made sense. The dispensers were like miniature mediguns in themselves. In lieu of anything to kill herself with, she made for it.

The dove took off as she came closer. She had reached the machine and was fumbling for the “on” switch when a voice echoed in the back of her mind.

 _It messes with the brain, is what I mean_. _Memory loss, with prolonged exposure. Permanent._

The Pyro stopped dead.

 

* * *

 

Unlike the infirmary, the workshop was not locked. The door eased open without so much as a squeak; of course Engineer would keep it well-oiled.

The Pyro slunk inside the dark room, her way lit only by the last few minutes of sun that seeped in through the window. She shut the door quietly behind her. On her way from the infirmary to the workshop she had overheard Scout in the common room, back from respawn— _hey, okay, which one’a you fucksticks just killed me?_  . . . _Why, cuz the barracks is a freakin’ crime scene is why_  . . . _Wait,_ who _was looking for me?_

The game was up. Hopefully no one would think to look for her here.

She needed time.

The faulty dispenser was right where she remembered, tucked in the far corner behind a workbench. The red tape “X” was still plastered across its screen. With the last of her strength she dragged it out. When something fell from on top of it as it moved, she flinched so badly she nearly fell over.

Whatever had fallen to the floor was small, hard enough to make out in the half-light that she had to squint. It was a thin cardboard box, cheaply-made, printed with blue ink and covered in bright, stylized explosions. Chunky yellow letters wrote out something on the front, but she didn’t need to be able to read them to recognize what it was. She sank down with her back to the dispenser and picked up the box of sparklers.

First things first. She had seen Engineer build up his machines enough times on the field to turn the thing on without any trouble. The dispenser clattered once, then twice, then kicked into gear with its now-familiar hum. It glowed a faint blue as the healing beams curled out and around her, and she let out a grateful sigh as the pain slowly began to fade from her face.

The sparklers rattled softly as she pulled the box open, rolling around one another. She had no lighter, she remembered as she pulled one of the fireworks out. Matches, though. She fumbled for her ammo pouch, found a matchbook, and lit a match. With shaking hands she put the flame to the red tip of the sparkler.

It hissed to life, bright and beautiful. The sparks cascaded in whorls and patterns, raining down, every tiny fire unique and distinct. They fell onto her bloodstained suit and winked out, like snowflakes in water. Her eyes were drawn to the metal left behind, charred and black, still blazing hot. Once it burned out, she put it aside, and pulled off her gloves.

The white lines on her palms and fingers greeted her, as they always had: thick bands of scar tissue, silent witnesses to something she had never been able to remember and never figured to be important. She studied them both in the blue light of the dispenser, numb and tired. Then she picked up the dead sparkler, cool now, and matched it up with the scars. The metal aligned, perfectly—first one hand, then the other.

Blinking, she put it back down and lit another. It blazed in the darkness, and she searched for the excitement she remembered they had once brought her—the very excitement that had gotten her into this, really. She lit another, then three more, and then more, until she had a whole handful of dazzling sparklers hissing in chorus.

She felt nothing.

Tobias was there, in front of her, sitting with his long arms resting on his knees. “So,” he said. She didn’t look at him. “This is it? This is your big plan?”

One of the sparklers burned out. The Pyro exhaled. “Just leave me alone.”

He shrugged, glancing down at her hands. A moment passed, then: “Kinda pointless, isn’t it.” When she did nothing but look at him, waiting, he went on. For the first time since he had appeared, his voice was level and calm, more like the voice she thought she remembered. “Cuz like I mean if you’d just let the damn sparklers fall on the other fireworks we probably wouldn’t be here right now, would we.”

Pointless. Saving one little pile of fireworks from going up in their faces—pointless compared to the live and loaded deathtrap she’d kept in her yard for so long. A drawn-out sigh left her. “It probably would have happened some other way. I think people just get hurt when they’re around me. I’m ... bad luck.”

“Yeah,” he admitted.

They sat there like that for a while, watching the sparklers burn down. When the last one went out, she exhaled and let them all clatter from her hand.

“You’re not really him,” she said. Tobias glanced up at her. “I mean. You’re not anything like him. He wasn’t—cruel,” she said with as much conviction as she could muster. Pieces of him were collecting in the corners of her mind, flickering to the fore of her thoughts. The timbre of his voice, his awkward laugh, the way he looked at her. Little things. She hadn’t even known him more than a week. Maybe she was wrong.

Tobias shifted where he sat, considering it. Then he shrugged, and reached out to pick up one of the dead fireworks. “Don’t know. Maybe. Probably even. But it don’t really matter now, does it?”

She supposed it didn’t.

She felt the strange buzz as the dispenser filled her with whatever thing the Medic had slipped into its healing rays. She could almost taste it, a sharp chemical bite. Things were getting blurry and hazy and strangely bright. When she glanced down at the burnt-out sparklers, they looked like peppermint sticks and finger bones.

“Tobias?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”


	23. Interlude III.

 

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!  
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.  
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!  
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.

— _Eloisa to Abelard_ , Alexander Pope.


	24. Epilogue

 

It didn’t happen often. It happened just seldom enough that he never anticipated it, and it blindsided him every time.

“Engineer?” said a muffled voice.

The Engineer paused in his work, studying the machine that had been his best distraction lately. A robotic hand, strong metal fingers curled in on itself like spider’s legs on his workbench. They moved ever so little on their own as he watched. “Yeah, Pyro?”

Behind him, he heard her cough, and it got lost in the hum of his workshop’s lights and the birdsong coming in through the open windows. She cleared her throat, then said, slow and thick through the filters, “ . . . Where am I?”

A long moment passed as the Engineer tried to steel himself for what he knew was coming.

He turned, forcing himself to keep a straight expression. The sight that met him was the usual one: Pyro sitting slouched on a crate in a corner she had claimed for her own, a corner plastered with stickers and bright things. Her mask was off now, still a uncomfortably rare sight. As far as Engineer knew he was still the only one to have ever seen it. “How d’you mean?”

The confusion in her voice was overwhelming. “I . . . this isn’t your house.”

This. This again. Engineer swallowed down the sigh building in his throat. “We’re at work, Smoky.”

“ . . . Oh. Oh,” she said, craning her neck to peer down at her bulky blue suit. She was quiet for a long time, just examining herself. Then she turned to look at her surroundings, at the crayon drawings and candy wrappers taped all over the walls within her reach. A bewildered little noise slipped out of her mask as she picked up a picture that had slipped to the floor. It was a rainbow of childish depictions of childish things, of unicorns and kittens and God only knew what else. Engineer hated looking at them. “What are these?”

How long had it been?

How long had it been since that morning he had walked into his workshop only to find the Pyro covered in dried blood and asleep in the grip of the poisoned dispenser? For a good five seconds he had just gaped down at her, at the black and burnt-out sparklers he had purchased on the Fourth that littered the ground around her. She still held one in her gloved hand, even unconscious, and didn’t let go of it as he shook her awake, too rough, too hard.

It felt like it took much too long for her to move, to groan and feebly push his hand off her. What in the hell did she think she was doing, he wanted to know. How long had she been here? Didn’t she damn well know what was good for her?

What had she done?

But she answered none of his questions. She scarcely even paid attention to him, her head constantly turning to point her lenses at something else. The only way he could get her to look at him was to physically turn her face toward him, and when he did she made muted, mumbling protests before lifting each of his individual fingers off.

The last of his patience was vanishing when the war sirens pierced the air. The Pyro’s head jerked up and for a moment she was perfectly still. Then a delighted exclamation too warped to understand rattled out of her mask. She was on her feet in a heartbeat, and before Engineer knew it she had taken his hand and was dragging him out toward the battlements.

On the field she was a monster. Engineer had never seen her so enthusiastic in her work, or so brutal. He had been watching from the battlements when she found the RED spy, trying to sneak into their front door. She pinned him to the wall with her ax, and torched him limb by limb, still alive. Engineer had left before she was done, the sound too much for him just then.

And again, later, when he was scrambling to get his sentry rebuilt after the enemy heavy had gunned it down. Sniper was behind him, firing off arrow after arrow into the crowd of REDs pushing through the doorway, and across the courtyard the rest of the team was surging out to defend the base. The place was a hive of screaming men and gunfire, and Engineer had just turned the last screw on the new machine when a muted war cry split the air amid the chaos. He looked up just in time to see the Pyro leap from the catwalk, down between the RED heavy and his medic. She separated them with two perfectly-aimed blasts of compressed air, hurling the heavy into Demoman’s sticky trap and the enemy medic into the stairs. The heavy went down (or up, in the air and in pieces, rather), and that left the medic the only man left alive. Before anything else could be done the Pyro was upon him, boot planted square on his chest.

There was an uncharacteristic silence amongst the team as they watched her jam her flare gun as far down his throat as it would go. Engineer looked away when she brought out her ax, and tried to ignore the screaming.

It cut short soon enough. When he searched for her again, she was already skipping away.

Skipping.

The whole day all she was a picture of delight, singing to herself, laughing and shaking her flamethrower over her head after every victory. When the end-hours whistle came and the Administrator announced them the winners of the day, she whooped and caught up the nearest teammate in a bear hug. (The Spy kept his composure remarkably well, too—at least, he did until the Soldier declared a patriotic American victory dog-pile and joined them.)

The Engineer couldn’t take it. The sight that had greeted him that morning had gnawed at him all day, and his fears only multiplied the longer he went without answers. He cornered the Pyro outside as they all made their way back into the base, waited until he was sure they were alone. When only the cooling evening air and crickets served as their company, it all spilled out. “Okay,” he said, “Pyro, come on now, what the _hell_ were you doin’ in there last night? What were you _thinkin’_ , what were you possibly . . . ”

She looked at him. Just looked at him, head a little to one side, none of the tension lining her stance in the way he’d grown used to in confronting her about anything. She said nothing to him, absolutely nothing, even as his voice got louder and sharper.

He had been about to start shaking her when her head whipped down and to the side, the only sign of life since this had started. Before he could do anything, she had dropped to all fours, face level with a tiny grasshopper at their feet.

Thirty seconds later she had it by one oversized leg, dangling over her flamethrower’s pilot light. She cooed at it as it struggled and smoked, until it was nothing but a tiny, blackened corpse. Then, with great care, she put it back down on the ground, and trotted off.

It was the same for the rest of the week. She tore the battlefield apart, to the point where from his sentry nests Engineer could see REDs going out of their way to avoid her, going so far as into jump into the canal, where she had never followed them before. Now she did. He could hear her muffled shouting echo out of the sewers quite often these days.

Her newly-acquired glee never left her. She made buildings out of the books in the common room instead of reading them, she built a blanket fort over the back of the couch with chairs stolen from the kitchen. He walked in on Scout kicking it to pieces a day later and didn’t have the heart to stop him. “Pyro’ll be upset,” was all he said, tired.

“Pyro, screw Pyro, what good’s that mumblin’ bozo ever fuckin’ done me, _nothin_ ’ that’s what, God, some’a us was sittin’ on these. Keep your freak on a leash, okay, Jesus.” Scout picked up a chair in either arm and stalked past him with them.

As luck would have it, Pyro wandered into the common room again not two minutes later. She found the blankets strewn on the ground and over the one remaining chair, and the very first thing she did was drag Engineer over and make a great fuss, pointing and mumbling. He’d hardly been able to get a word out before Scout came back. Pyro had ignored him until he picked up the last chair.

_“Hht’s mmine!”_

Scout gave her the most withering look Engineer had ever seen off him, until Pyro wrapped both hands around one of the chair legs and pulled. Scout yelled and jerked it out of her grip, snarled something at her.

To Engineer’s shock, she backed off. She stood uncertainly before them for a moment, hands curled in front of her chest, and then she ran out of the room.

They stared after her for a few seconds. Finally Scout snorted, hefting the chair back up.

“Good freakin’ riddance.”

It was only the beginning, and as the days passed the realization that Pyro was no longer the woman Engineer knew began to close in on him.

He denied it as long as he could. This was Pyro, after all, and if Pyro was anything she was a survivor. Something as moronic as a spiked dispenser wouldn’t take her down. It couldn’t. It’d wear off in a few more respawns, he told himself. It’d wear off in a few more days. A few more weeks . . .

The night he came into his workshop and found her playing with his sprockets and gears and wearing one of his gloves like a hat was the night his fraying temper snapped. He’d yelled her down, ripped the machinery from her hands, called her a lunatic and an idiot. God in heaven, he just wanted her to respond. He would have welcomed another punch to the face, a screaming match, anything to tell him that the Pyro—the arsonist, the whip-smart, unbalanced arsonist he had known was still there somewhere under the mask.

She had cowered before him and hidden under the workbench. Hadn’t moved for three hours, until Engineer surrendered and coaxed her out with candy and soft words. Afterwards she parked herself on a crate in the corner, amusing herself with his spare parts until she fell asleep. He ignored her the best he could, until around four in the morning, when his blueprints were starting to look fuzzy and his hand hurt from holding the pencil.

She was all there was left for him to focus on. The only thought that kept running through his head was _she did it on purpose._

God, what could he have missed?

The next day he gathered up his plans and notes and showed them to Medic, and Medic took one look at them and asked him what the devil he was on about. “It’s Pyro, doc,” he said. “They’ve—they got in t’that bum dispenser. It’s, they ain’t right no more.”

“And?”

“ . . . And it’s messed ‘em up bad, Medic, damn it! Don’t you tell me you ain’t noticed!”

“I have noticed Herr Pyro being especially effective in their fighting lately,” Medic answered, rolling up the blueprints and handing them back to him. “That is all. I am sorry it bothers you so much, but as I have told you—there is no way to undo the effect, not in the way you are looking for. Whatever it has done to the Pyro is permanent.” He gave Engineer a curious sort of look. “They seem happier, if anything. Is that not better?”

The Engineer was not a man of senseless violence. There was no use in destroying perfectly good technology, especially that which could be reverse-engineered. But that night he took the dispenser out back with a sledgehammer and Demo’s strongest whiskey. By the time he was done, the dispenser was scrap, and he couldn’t walk straight.

Naturally it was the Pyro that found him like that, him sitting on what was left of the Godforsaken thing and too drunk to control himself proper. She sat down on the ground in front of him, hands wrapped around damn teddy bear of all things, where had she even gotten that? She watched him while he apologized, over and over, frustrated and bewildered and guilty. He wasn’t even sure what he was apologizing for, except what he hadn’t done. That he hadn’t watched her more. That he hadn’t gone after her that night in the kitchen.

He’d failed her. He’d failed her so badly.

He thought he had gotten it out of his system when Pyro put her head to one side, like a dog trying very hard to understand. She looked around, down, and noticed the toy she held. A moment later she was offering it up to him, saying something that was lost under the mask. When he didn’t take it right away she pushed it against his chest, repeating herself. She did it twice more before he understood what she was saying.

“Don’t cry. It’s okay. Don’t cry.”

He took the bear. His eyes stung as he did.

 

* * *

 

Time had passed, and he was left with the Pyro turning the drawing over in her hands. “Engineer?”

“Nothin’,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag, carefully not looking at her. “Ain’t nothin’. Don’t you mind that. You feelin’ okay?”

“I . . . I guess,” she said, looking at the paper a little longer before laying it back down among the others. “Where’s Shark?”

“Back in your room, where you left it.”

“Oh. That’s good.”

These were the worst days, the moments when the regressed child she had become would falter, just for a little while. The barely-there shell it left behind, a pale shadow of the arsonist, made him sick. She was a puppet in a part, a television rerun. By now Engineer knew all her lines. He hated every single one.

“Where’s Tobias?”

Especially that one. Every time, without fail. Engineer heaved a sigh. “Not here.”

“Where is he?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

That quieted her, left her sitting there looking lost. Just like always. Tobias, and her flamethrower, were the only two things she ever asked after. He’d still never figured out who Tobias had been to her. He supposed he never would.

After a while, Engineer shook his head, tossing the oil rag he’d been fiddling with aside. He turned back to his work, twisting at joints and wires. “You hungry?” he said. From the corner of his eye he saw her shake her head. “Right, well. It’ll be dinner before too long, anyway.”

“Okay,” she said distantly. “Engineer?”

“Mhm.”

“Tell . . . tell Scout that . . . can you apologize to Scout for me? I didn’t, I never got to . . . I . . . ”

Engineer went still. That—that was new. She had never said that before. He froze, a thousand new questions bursting into his head. “Can I _what?”_

He turned just in time to see her stare down at the mask and put it back on. He got no more answers. Instead the Pyro tilted her head to the side, meeting his gaze for a moment. Then her attention wandered, lighting at once upon the same drawing she had just put down. She made an awed kind of sound, grabbing it up. A few seconds later she had found the crayon set that Heavy had given her a few months ago, and Engineer was forgotten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end.
> 
> Dedicated to Noel B. Thank you.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [chart a course](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4008586) by [PreludeInZ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreludeInZ/pseuds/PreludeInZ)




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